The education sector in India has been on the rise for the last decade, except during the turmoil created by the Covid-19 pandemic. As per statistics, it is expected to reach US$ 180 billion in the financial year 2020. On the demand side, there are 250 million school-going children in the country.
While the digitally-evolved supply side of this sector has higher Internet penetration, helping with the education delivery. Besides this, the e-learning market in India is the second-largest in the world, after the US.
In between all this, the payment side of education often gets shadowed by other bigger realities. An educational institution, no matter how small or big, runs with adequate resources to achieve maximum output.
Providing the best-in-class education comes with its fair share of operational challenges, one of which is ensuring timely payment processing amongst various stakeholders. Pairing it up with the number of recognized schools, colleges, and other educational institutions in India, the challenge to handle payments seems even bigger.
Payment challenges for educational institutions and the related chaos
Managing both the inflow and outflow of payments for schools and colleges is a tough nut to crack. Let’s consider this example to understand things in a better way –
A school has 2000 children studying in it in a specific year. The parents of all these children pay the school fees either online or in cash. Handling these payments is not the only complication in this regard.
It is interesting to note that a student’s school fee has multiple elements, which include admission fee, tuition fee, lab charges, library fee, and the list goes on. In addition, there can be ad-hoc charges to be paid in some specific month for outings, camping, or educational tours. Reconciling the total payments received in the respective cost heads is a big challenge and often gets impacted because of human errors and limited resources to handle payments.
At large, an educational institution faces the following challenges related to payment handling and processing:
- Accepting payments through multiple modes of payment
- Irregular fee structure across different classes
- Time-consuming reconciliation process
- Splitting of payments across multiple stakeholders
Possible ways to handle payments in the education sector
Accepting payments for different sub-entities separately
Asking the parents of enrolled students to pay different fee components to different school entities as and when needed is not feasible. It will also increase the operational hassles for the institution’s management staff.
Consolidating different charges periodically
Asking for consolidated fee payments for a quarter or six months at once can streamline the process to some extent. However, not every parent would be willing to pay school fees for multiple months at once. Neither will it solve the reconciliation problem.
Accepting payments online via a payment gateway
The institutions can make provisions to accept payments online via a payment gateway. While it can reduce the burden of reconciliation, the need to split payments remains untouched.
Paytm Split Settlements to the rescue
With Paytm Split Settlements, you can split the incoming payments/fees to various stakeholders and settle them with different vendors/bank accounts easily. It does not require you to manage the splitting of payments manually.
Example – Assuming your educational institute has a complex fee structure that comprises hostel fees, tuition fees, and mess fees. With Paytm Split Settlements, you can collect the respective share of these fee components in different bank accounts directly.
Once you have added the accounts and the ratio/percentage of the split, the incoming payments get split on the way to the linked accounts directly.
The best part – you need not pay any additional fee for the Paytm Split Settlements facility except the basic MDR.
Recommended Read: Industry-wise Use Cases of Paytm Split Settlements
How to get started with Paytm Split Settlements?
With a major proportion of school payments being made online these days, it is imperative to have a payment solution that can help with payment splitting and easy reconciliation. Paytm Split Settlements make this possible for schools, colleges, and other educational institutions.
