In the coming months, your school’s PushCoin account will be converted to a new revenue tracking model which separates sales from payments.
Why the change.
Today, when a student is sold a meal, this sale impacts revenue. However, a school may not actually be getting paid for the sales for a long time, for example, if student Wallets are not funded by their sponsors regularly. This creates a discrepancy between funds in your bank account and revenues from sales against student Wallet accounts. This problem is not unique to school cafeterias. It’s possible for example that a parent buys an item on the school webstore and pays with an eCheck. A few days later the payment is rejected by the customer’s bank due to Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF). There was a sale but the payment never came through. There are more scenarios like this and they all have one thing in common: revenue must not be recorded until the payment makes it to the school bank account.
What impact will this have on reports.
Depending on your role and needs, you will use one report for obtaining sales on student accounts and another report to track payments.
For example, if you are a vendor who runs cafeterias, you will likely be interested in the sales report. This is because your business model requires knowing how many sales you made in a given period. You will also run one or more cash reports because you need to know how much cash was collected in the cafeterias but that part is not changing in the new model.
If you work at a school business office and the school bills families for transportation, Pre-K or yearbooks, you may be more interested in the actual payments and not the charges. This is because you want to know who has paid and not whom you originally billed. Depending on the payment status, you may refuse to provide a product or service. You will of course be able to run a report asking the system for paid, partially paid or unpaid items.
In all cases, once the payments settle in the school bank account items that you sold or charged for are marked as fully or partially paid off and realized revenues are starting to show up.
Anonymous cash sales at the POS.
Anonymous cash transactions at the POS will be recorded under a designated anonymous user. The anonymous user will have a Wallet and Fees balances, just like a regular student, except these balances should normally be zero since items sold to the anonymous user were paid for in cash. Historical anonymous sales will be migrated to this new user account for consistency.
Webstore sales to Guest users.
If someone buys a product on the school webstore that is not marked for a district student – for example, an out of district student participating in the Summer course – the sale will be recorded under an automatically created online customer account that you will have access to. These online customer accounts will look similar to your students, i.e. you will be able to review their past purchases and make refunds back to their “Wallets”. You will also be able to contact them because their full name, email and phone will be shared with you. This way sales to online guests will be easier to track and manage. As you would expect, online customer accounts will also have Wallet and Fees balances. If a payment for a “Guest item” ends up bouncing, the customer’s account will show a negative Fees balance. The customer can be assessed a penalty and mailed an invoice.
Impact on the parents.
Families who maintain positive or zero Fees and Wallet balances will not see much of an impact after this change goes live. However, parents who owe for school fees will be affected. For example, if a parent wishes to pay on the webstore for a school prom ticket, unless the school makes allowance for partial payments, the customer will need to pay for the past debt to buy a new item. As expected, until the funds settle in the school bank account, items sold online show up as unpaid on reports.
It’s important to remember that debt is paid in chronological order. This means that unless the product sold online overrides the chronological repayment priority, a partial payment for “prom” may actually go towards a prior-year school fee.
Further questions?
This brief article introduced some of the changes coming to your PushCoin account. If you have any questions or concerns please let us know immediately.