While the University System of Georgia turned to TouchNet to help manage geographic diversity, Thomas Edison State College (TESC) called upon the vendor to help manage billing and electronic payments for its virtual campus. The school, a state institution with nearly 11,000 students, is a center of distance learning. From its inception in 1972, TESC relied upon telephone operators to register students for classes every other month. Most students would dial into the school’s Trenton, NJ headquarters, enroll, and read off their credit card numbers to an operator at the other end of the line. Some students would employ an even lower-tech strategy— selecting courses from a printed catalog, and mailing in a form with a check. Behind the scenes, operators would transfer billing information to the school’s bursar, who would process it accordingly. The whole process took weeks.

Then, more recently, CIO Drew Hopkins and Bursar Philip Sanders joined forces to modernize the entire approach and make electronic payments a reality. The duo purchased the TouchNet Commerce Management System, and had inhouse programmers customize it to interface automatically with the school’s Colleague ERP system from Datatel (www.datatel.com).

In no time, the new system generated so many efficiencies that Hopkins and Sanders redeployed elsewhere three of the four employees who previously spent whole days entering data from phone and mailed payments into the computer. Eventually, these efficiencies opened up other avenues for TESC, too; once managing billing and payment cycles became easier, the school expanded its registration to a monthly schedule (instead of every other month), a move that has resulted in what Hopkins describes as modest but steady enrollment growth.

“We anticipated some degree of enrollment growth with [automated electronic payments], but we never anticipated it so quickly,” says Hopkins. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think our system would be this successful.”

Variations on a Theme

Bowdoin College performed an experiment in mid-2004 that had interesting results. CIO Mitch Davis and some of the school’s IT staffers set out with a video camera to chronicle the process of a new employee getting hired and paid. The video crew followed paperwork from one person to the next, recording every step along the way.

When all was said and done, the tape had recorded more than 50 manual steps—a whopping number even by Davis’s standards, and he was relatively familiar with the school’s antiquated approach. The tape was not for naught; after watching it again and again, Davis embarked on a thorough process review to fix all of the inefficiencies with the hiring system, and with the school’s payment systems in general.

In May of 2005, this effort led the liberal arts school to purchase a pair of new financial software packages from financial management and business intelligence vendor Blackbaud (www.blackbaud.com). One system, The Financial Edge, will tackle financial management by enhancing communication across all monetary and payment systems, and will automate all of the payment processes Davis documented in his video.

Specifically, this is expected to help college officials ensure that the organization uses the annual budget as a management and planning tool to make resources go farther, automate purchasing for tighter control of spending, and decrease the amount of time spent on tracking money it is owed. While the system d'es not yet enable students to pay tuition bills online, Davis says this feature will be available soon, as the school continues to make a transition to the Web-services-oriented .NET infrastructure from Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com).

“It’s our goal to build all of our administrative services around Web Services technology,” he says. “Once we’ve got that in place, our entire approach to payment will be electronic.”

A similar system conversion at Abilene Christian University led technologists to embrace a new billing and tuition payment system from banking giant Sallie Mae (www.salliemae.com). For years, ACU was using a billing system it had written itself, one that resulted in one bill for families every month. But the system was far from perfect. It required hours of maintenance; performance was spotty.

By 2003, the old billing software was in dire need of replacement. That’s when Gary West, director of Student Financial Services, set out to find a new system. West investigated a number of electronic payment systems, but all of them meant revolutionizing billing to the point of generating two or three bills (for tuition, housing, campus purchases, etc.) each month. Instead, he wanted a new system with minimal change for the end user.

Ultimately, West decided that the best solution was to improve the old ACU system with an electronic billing service from Sallie Mae. The solution, technically referred to as a managed service, has made Sallie Mae’s technology the centerpiece of ACU’s financial applications. The school runs a file that produces a snapshot of each student’s account at the time of a bill.

However, instead of printing bills itself, the school sends these digital files electronically to Sallie Mae, which reorganizes some data elements, prints the bills, stuffs them into envelopes, and mails them out. Sallie Mae receives payments via the US Postal Service and online, and processes every one of them. Most importantly, Sallie Mae agreed to send ACU its money daily, instead of holding the payments for 15 to 30 days to earn additional revenue from interest, as some other vendors do. For end users, the process is seamless. But behind the scenes, West says that switching to this electronic model has made everything about billing and payments easier and more efficient than ever before.

“We’ve essentially outsourced our entire billing and payment functions,” he says, adding that Sallie Mae charges roughly $1 per statement. “Our bills look the same, but we’re handling a fraction of the work we used to, and I’d say everyone is better off.”

See related story The Chargeback Dilemma