Quick tips:

1. Be flexible with your students and their choices of payment methods.
2. Automate your payment collection processes.  
3. Rely on a trusted payment facilitator to securely collect payments and guarantee compliance for your RTO.  
4. Find a payment facilitator with dedicated, 24/7 payment-related support.  
5. Don’t box your business in – find a solution that scales as your business grows and matures. 

Be flexible

Think about the usual ways you pay for goods and services in your personal life – what do all these payment methods have in common? Chances are your answer has something to do with convenience. Convenience is a huge factor in a customer’s decision-making process, and it pays dividends to be flexible. 

When managing the student payments collection process for your RTO, consider offering your students numerous, easy-to-use payment methods that make collecting their payments as unobtrusive as possible – like direct debit, credit and debit cards. Also, consider implementing payment plans so your students don’t feel pressured to pay off their large course fees all in one go.   

Flexibility allows your students more freedom to stay on top of their finances and budget more effectively. For example, one student might want to pay their monthly tuition using direct debit on a specific day (e.g. payday). Increased flexibility and a diverse offering of payment options help attract new business, delight your existing students and retain your customer base as your business matures.  

You will need to find and work with a payment facilitator who can empower your business with the ability to set up and manage payment plans with numerous payment methods. As the name suggests, payment facilitators exist to facilitate the collection of payments – moving money from one bank account to another.

Automate payment collection

Have you ever forgotten to pay for a subscription or service you use regularly, only to find yourself locked out? Frustrating, to say the least. Wouldn’t it be better to use a system that automatically processes these payments for you, so you never have to remember to pay your course fees again?  

Automating your student payment collection processes is a positive step for you and your students. Not only do automated payments help your students stay on top of their fees, but automating your payment collection minimises the work required by your administrative team. When automated, payments are collected and processed automatically, without additional intervention from your business or students.  

Now your staff have far more time to focus on growing your business and further improving experiences for all your enrolled students, and your students no longer need to remember to make payments themselves.  

Again, it’s best to find a trusted and reliable payment facilitator to help you automate these essential payment collection processes for your RTO so you can ensure stable cash flow. This positive injection of dependable money will give your business the confidence to grow and scale. 

Improve your security and reduce risk

Maintaining good security hygiene is an essential part of any running business. It pays to be hyper-vigilant and diligent to ensure your business stays compliant. Of course, this is always far easier said than done, especially when collecting and processing payments from your body of enrolled students via the Internet. Meeting these compliance requirements is often complicated, challenging and expensive - but thankfully there’s an easy solution to ensure your business is compliant.  

The easiest way to ensure your business meets security compliance is to collect your payments with a trusted payment facilitator. As covered above, payment facilitators are businesses that help to facilitate the movement of money from one bank account to another and are responsible for ensuring that sensitive student payment details are captured and stored in a secure environment. Payment facilitators undertake regular compliance checks to ensure that they are meeting PCI guidelines and are audited by PCI-certified third-party contractors every year to maintain their certification. 

Leave the complex world of payment handling to the experts - focus on your students and scaling your RTO instead.  

Offer dedicated support for your students

Good customer service can make or break your RTO business, and this is especially true when it comes to handling payments. As we’ve covered, the world of payment collection is complex and sometimes, things go wrong: from human error to technical issues, there’s a wide world of ways that payments can fail. In addition, sometimes your students might need to pause their payments  or change their payment details – and these requests can build up and quickly become insurmountable.  

It's best practice to ensure this essential support work is conducted by professionals.  

There are two main reasons why it’s a sensible move to find a payment facilitator who offers robust, round-the-clock payment-related support for your students.  

Firstly, payment facilitators know the complicated world of payments better than anyone else and are therefore in a far better position to offer reliable and trusted support.  

Secondly, finding a payment facilitator who offers dedicated support takes the pressure off your internal team, which permits you far more freedom to focus on educating students, and growing your business. 

Find a solution that scales with your business

Where will your business be in 6 months? How about a year from today? What about a decade?  

One of the most important best practices for collecting student payments for your RTO is to ensure your payment management processes are robust and sturdy enough to last the test of time as your business grows, scales and matures. After all, if you need to retrain your staff and students on new payment collection processes every 6-12 months, you will be effectively wasting valuable time that could be spent on further growing your business.  

It's important to (again) work with a trusted payment facilitator who can move and grow with your business, providing the best support and technology to effectively collect payments today, and well into the future.

Kickstart your business growth with a student management software solution  

If you need a robust, ready-for-market solution to help you roll out these best practices for your education business, consider a student management software provider like aXcelerate or Edge Learning Solutions. aXcelerate and Edge are two SaaS providers that create software for student, learning, and on-the-job training management for merchants in Australia and New Zealand respectively. Student management applications actively support your education business with insightful reporting and powerful student management features, which readily scale as your business grows and matures.

Both aXcelerate and Edge partnered with payment facilitator Ezypay to allow for the secure collection of one-off and automated payments. Empowered by Ezypay’s industry-leading payment collection technology, users can set up custom payment plans to automatically charge their students on schedule or demand – and trust that these funds will land in their bank accounts, transaction after transaction.  

Ready to see what automated student payment processing looks like for your RTO? Discover a revolutionary student management system like aXcelerate and Edge with payments powered by Ezypay.