Seven Ways to Lower Tuition Delinquency at Your School

BY BETH RICCARDI, Senior Service Delivery Manager, Blackbaud

Preventing late tuition payments is crucial for maintaining your school’s financial sustainability and budget. Fortunately, there are effective strategies you can implement to achieve this goal. Applying these seven tips can keep tuition delinquency at bay and ensure a steady cash flow for your private or independent school.

1. Start the enrollment/re-enrollment process early.

Always kick off the enrollment/re-enrollment process 60–90 days before the earliest due date. Put notifications in the same system families use to check grades and schedules. Ongoing communication is critical, so keep in contact with your families during this time. Set expectations and provide an accurate timeline so they know what actions to take and when.

2. Keep it simple.

Flexibility is essential, but offering too many options for your families can put unnecessary stress on the business office and make it harder to manage cash flow. Stick to the basics, automate reminders as much as possible, and enable autopay by ACH or credit card as an option in your tuition management system.

3. Manage billpayers based on their needs.

Do you handle employees differently? Do you have hardship families or special arrangements? How many scenarios do you need to consider when making policies or choosing software settings for your school? Try to accommodate everyone’s needs—within reason.

4. Use metrics to make educated decisions.

When your enrollment software fully integrates with your tuition and accounting systems, you can make data-driven decisions based on consistent, accurate reporting. When reviewing the data, look at the whole school population so you are not making decisions based on outliers.

5. Stick to your school’s policies.

What are your school’s policies for non-payment? Document them in written guidelines for your business office and enrollment staff. It’s OK to be empathetic and evaluate on a case-by-case basis, but to ensure equitable treatment of all families, all parties involved must be on the same page and use consistent practices.

6. Be aware of what’s going on with delinquent families.

Don’t wait until the end of a semester—when a family is already three months behind—to discuss payment. With each month that passes, it becomes increasingly difficult for families to catch up. Discuss the issues up front and devise a payment plan that allows the family to pay what they can or consider offering mid-year financial aid. Partial payment is better than nothing and will gradually reduce the school’s overall delinquent balance.

7. Consider all the options available to your families.

Explore all possibilities for your families and ensure they are informed of every option. Select three or four payment plans that will be best for your school, and let families choose the one that is right for them. Families are happiest when they have multiple methods to pay their balances.