Helping Guardians manage their top up accounts

This guide is for administrators to help parents and guardians manage their online top-up accounts for their students.

Permissions

To help guardians manage payments, you might need the following permissions:

• Finance: View – To see payments, credit notes, and outstanding balances.

• Finance: Administer – To issue refunds, log top-ups, manage credit notes, and cancel invoices.

• Extra-Curricular: Administer – To payments and refunds specifically for clubs and trips.

If you don't have permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Understanding which account types use Top-Ups

There are two Customer Account Types that involve top-ups, Meals and Ad-hoc. 

• Meals is used solely for meal payments
• Ad-hoc accounts are used for a variety of purposes; commonly, they are used for Wraparound Care Club payments and other ad-hoc payments. 

Trips, standard clubs and school shop customer account types do not involve top-ups and are paid directly at the point of purchase. These account types do not have a running account balance and do not make use of top-ups

To review your existing customer account types, navigate to School > Payments > Setup, then click Customer Account Types on the left-hand side.

Admin Assisted Top-Ups

If you do not use the parent portal for payments, or if a guardian is unable to top up online for another reason, you can follow these instructions to top it up for them:

• Open the student's profile and click Payments on the left-hand side.
• Click on the payment account you need to top up. This will open an overview of the account
• At the top, you will see green buttons saying Top up by cash, voucher, cheque and card (if card payments have been enabled).
• Select the appropriate payment method, and a slide-over will open, allowing you to input the payment details.

You can read more on reviewing balances and topping up funds here

Troubleshooting Missing Funds

If a parent is questioning where the funds are after a top-up, please check the following:

• Have they topped up the wrong account? Check if they accidentally put a meals payment into a wraparound care account or vice versa. Do they have more than one child at the school? If so, check if they accidentally topped up the incorrect student's account. To check where a parent's top-up landed, you can:

  • Head to School > Payments > Accounts > Top-Ups
  • Ensure you are on the All tab
  • Set the green filter above the table to the date of the top-up
  • Find the payment by referring to the Paid by and Amount column
  • Confirm where the top-up landed by checking the Type column to see which account type was topped up (e.g. Meals or Wraparound Care) and the Account column to see whose account was topped up if the parent has multiple students at the school.

  If you have determined the top-up was sent to the wrong account, use this guidance to help you decide on how to best manage this: Transferring payments

• Confirm the customer account type is set up correctly, ensure that your card payments are verified, and check that the customer account type is set to accept card payments, create accounts for students, show on the parent portal, and has been marked as verified.
• Check that the payment has definitely been submitted, ask the parent to check if the top-up is still in their basket, and that they have confirmed the transaction. You can also ask the guardian to check their bank statement to confirm the funds have left their account.
• Check for low funds- If the account was in the negative, the balance might show as lower than expected after the top-up. To export all of the incoming and outgoing transactions that make up an account balance in a single, easy-to-use file, refer to this guidance: Exporting Statements For Top-up Accounts

Setting Low Balance Alerts

It is not possible to automatically alert guardians when their child's balance is low; however, you can set up a custom group to alert yourself/other staff members, and send alerts manually:

• Navigate to School > School Structure > Custom Groups 
• Create a new group that contains current students
• Set up an automatic membership criterion for the account balance, and set the amount you would like to be alerted to it falling below.
• Set up a custom group alert for Joiners, along with the staff member(s) and alert method.
• You can also select this custom group when using a mail merge, allowing you to contact all of the guardians to remind them to top up.

You can read more detailed instructions on setting up this custom group here.