One of our favorite value-adds in Populi is online payment processing. Schools can link a merchant account or payment gateway account with Populi and start taking online payments for tuition, fees, and Bookstore purchases. Populi Billing already eases the processes connected to charging students, recording their payments, and settling their account balances. Credit card processing takes it even further: it lets your school use Populi to collect actual payments, helping your students pay their bills on time and helping you get money in the door.

Setup

Populi directly integrates with Chase Paymentech* merchant accounts, which include everything you need to process credit card payments and channel the funds to your back account. It also works with Authorize.net payment gateway accounts, which serve as a bridge between Populi and your existing merchant account.

To get set up with Populi credit card processing, we put you in touch with Chase Paymentech or send you over to Authorize.net. After completing the application process with your choice of provider, we plug your credentials into Populi. On your end, you configure a few settings to make sure credit card payments hit your General Ledger the way you want them to. Then you're good to go!

Howzitwork?

There's nothing to it. Just invoice your students as normal. When a student logs in, he'll see an alert on his Populi Home page.

Clicking the alert takes him to the Pay Now page. He can pay there, or send a link to the page to someone who wants to pay on his behalf.

You can also go to his Profile's financial dashboard and enter payment information yourself (as well as send a Pay Now link to someone else).

With Bookstore purchases, it comes up as a payment option. If you've set your Bookstore to public, anyone can come shop and place orders with you—and then pay by credit card.

Fees

As you probably know, credit card processing ain't free. Your payment processor takes a percentage of every credit card payment you accept. But Populi doesn't take any sort of cut whatsoever—we simply provide this functionality, free of charge, as part of our service to you.

Benefits

As of this writing, Populi has processed over $15 million worth of credit card payments on behalf of our client schools. Reducing the obstacles for students and parents to pay their tuition and fees is a great way to benefit your bottom line, and we're happy to make that easier on our customers.

* Interested in a Chase Paymentech account? Contact Populi Support and we'll get you started.