Transfers Import – Bank Feeds

This feature allows you to link your bank account with your SchoolMate account, so that you can download payment details and assign them to students automatically.

How it works:

SchoolMate has integrate the Finance Module with a company called GoCardless. GoCardless is company that can provide 2500+ bank feeds from banks across Europe; there is a list of banks it works with here. As part of the process you authorise GoCardless to access your bank data, SchoolMate then pulls this data from GoCardless and updates your SchoolMate account with it.

What does it cost?

The service is free to SchoolMate users, although you will need to have the Finance Module activated in your SchoolMate account.

Getting started:

You will need to create an account with GoCardless that allows them to access your bank data. The sign up form is here.

Next you need you link your SchoolMate account to your bank account.

1. Go to Finance
2. Click”Settings”
3. Click “Automatic Import”
4. Next, select your country from the drop-down list. Once you do this a list of all the banks in your country that GoCardless works with will appear. Click on the icon of your bank.
5. Once you have clicked on the icon of your bank, click “Connect bank”.
6. Click “Save”.

If all is correct, the lower part of the page will look like this:

In the upper part of the screen are the Transfer Settings.

In this section we tell the system what to do with the payment when it is added to the student’s payment card.

1. 1. Automatically create transactions.
   2. As most payments will be for courses chose this as the default.
   3. If you want to create invoices automatically for the payments that are added to the student’s card, tick this. If you want the invoices to be sent automatically to the student, tick this box in Finance – Settings – Additional Options:

Students will also need to have consent given to receiving emails on their cards:

.            4. Select the type of invoice and the numbering system that you would like to be created.

Importing Transfers:

Your bank credits will be uploaded automatically every morning at 10 am CET. If you want to upload them more often, click “Process manually”

Results of Importing Transfers:

To see your imported transfers and their statuses, go to Finance – Transfers Import:

When your transfers are uploaded there are 3 possible statuses for the transfers: “Not Matched”, “Solve Manually” and “Auto”. These are used depending on whether the amount and bank account numbers match what is in the student’s information.

The results of the upload will appear on the right-hand side:

Now we will look at how to deal with these different statuses.

Solve Manually:

This typically happens because, even thought the bank account is linked to a student, there might be a mixture of items that the transfer could be for.

1. 1. 1. 1. Click on “Cover Transaction” and see if there are any charges for books, fees etc., on the students card. Click the transaction listed if some or all of the payment is for this.

      

.      2. You may need to add a transaction if none exists or there is still part of the transfer to allocate. Once you have done that you can create invoices if required.

Not Matched:

In these cases the system has not found a student that matches the transfer details. In most cases it is because the bank account number is not on, or does not match, that on the student card.

If you click on “Assign account”, you can then chose a student to link to the payment. Once you have done that you can cover or add transactions as mentioned in Solve Manually above. You should also add the bank account number to the student’s card to make future payments easier.

Auto:

This is when the bank account matches and the system is able to clearly link the payment to the student’s payment card. Invoices will be created and sent automatically and marked as paid, depending on your settings – see “Import bank transfers – Settings” above.

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Related Tutorials

Transfer Import – XML Files