What is Tuition Auto Pay (TAP)
Tuition Auto Pay (TAP) is an online tuition payment solution offered by 1Core. TAP is director/center centric, meaning the parents enroll in TAP once which gives the center authorization to draft their bank or credit card account for tuition payment each billing period.
Access to Tuition Auto Pay (TAP)
When the Tuition Auto Pay (TAP) is enabled for your center, you will notice the option on the left panel as shown below:
Within the Tuition Auto Pay (TAP), you will see two sections on the TAP home page. The left side contains various "processing" links while the right side contains "enrollment" links.
Tuition Auto Pay (TAP) Enrollment
The first step in enrolling the parents in TAP is to select TAP Enrollment so to send out invitation email to parents by clicking on the “Send Tuition Auto Pay (TAP) Enrollment Invitation Email To Parents.” Parents enroll in TAP on their own via the Family Portal.
Note: This self service approach means no extra work for you and less liability as you do not have to handle parent's bank account and credit card information.
Send Enrollment Invitation Email to Parents
When you click on the option to send enrollment invitation email to parents, you will notice that the system organizes the statuses of the parents in 3 categories:
- Invitation Not Sent
- Invitation Sent But Not Yet Registered
- Registered in Family Portal But Not Enrolled in TAP
Note: Definition
- Registration => refers to whether the parents have registered for a 1Core Family Portal account
- Enrollment => refers to whether the parents have enrolled in Tuition Auto Pay (TAP)
The status is designed to help the Director to better manage their invitation email to parents. The Director can resend as many times as appropriate.
Following is an example of an email sent to parents inviting them to enroll in TAP:
In the email that the parents receive, there are 2 links added at the bottom. New parents will choose the first link to register with the 1Core Family Portal. Parents register by creating a password
Tuition Auto Pay Enrollment via Family Portal
When a parent login to the Family Portal, they will clearly see the option to enroll in Tuition Auto Pay (TAP).
Parents would select the funding account type and enter their funding account information:
After the parents are enrolled in TAP, when they click on the "Payment" link on the left panel, they can
- Manage Funding Accounts
- View Payment History
- Dis-enroll TAP
Multiple Funding Accounts
1Core allows parents to use multiple funding accounts to pay their tuition. If parents select to use multiple funding accounts, they need to specify the percentage for each funding account to add to 100%.
In the backend, the Director can also see if parents have enrolled with multiple funding accounts under
the Total Active Payors Enrolled in TAP link:
Tuition Auto Pay (TAP) Processing
TAP is Director controlled; therefore you (the Director) need to do the following steps to process the tuition payment after each billing period.
Note: You can process TAP payment as many times as you would like throughout the month. TAP will show you a list of TAP enrolled families with a ledger balances. As long as the TAP family has a ledger balance, you can draft their account.
Typically you would process all the TAP families with a ledger balance. However you can skip a family if you would like.
The system automatically proposes the ledger balance as the TAP payment amount by default. You can change the "TAP Amt to Process" if needed.
Automatic Posting of TAP Payment to the Ledger
After the TAP payments have been submitted for processing, the payment transactions are automatically posted to the ledger.
Review Status of Submitted TAP Payment
You can review the status of the submitted TAP payments within 1Core for reconciliation purposes as follows:
New TAP Implementation: End-to-End Test/Trial Run
It is highly recommended that the Director performs an end-to-end test/trial run to walk through the entire parent TAP enrollment process BEFORE inviting all the families to enroll.
The trial run let you can see for the steps the parents need to complete to enroll in TAP. This helps with answering parent’s questions after launch.
Test/Trial Run Steps:
- Add a new test family in 1Core. Important Note: You must use a personal email for this test family. You can't use your work email because it has been used as admin login to 1Core.
- Post a manual transaction item to this Test Parent Account Ledger (e.g. $5) so there is a balance to pay.
- Send an invitation to this test parent email.
- Login to the Test Family email.
- Register for a Family Portal account.
- Enroll in Tuition Auto Pay and make one-time payment of $5 ledger balance.
- Confirm that the $5 has been deposited to the business bank account.
Related user guides:
TAP functions for Director to manage the parents TAP accounts.