Once in a while we run into this question, usually at the start of a school year:
“A student who never showed up for school was delisted in our SIS — why hasn’t PushCoin refunded the enrollment fees automaticaly?”
To answer this question — and solve the “refund problem” — we need to review the fundamental difference between “Active in SIS” vs “Active in PushCoin”:
- In your SIS, an active student is anyone who is enrolled in the current school year as a student.
- In PushCoin, an active student is anyone whose fees are actively managed and remote access (typically to parents) is allowed, for the purpose of paying the fees off.
Above two statements are similar but not the same. Consider schools that use PushCoin to bill and accept payments for students who have long since left the district. Although they are not active students in their SIS, they are active in PushCoin, i.e. remote access is permitted, credit cards or eChecks are billed in payment plans, and parents receive invoices for outstanding fees.
This brings us to the main point of this post: for refunds to occur automatically, students must remain active in PushCoin.
Include all student records in the nightly “active students file” whose fees should continue to be managed, even students who are not enrolled in the current school year in your SIS.
The students file can indicate which students are delisted from the school year, for example by prefixing their grade with something like “GONE-“. In either case, PushCoin will refund their fees automatically as long as the refund date has not expired.
If you are not able to keep sending students who were delisted from the school, let us know as we have a trivial work-around for your situation. In this case, PushCoin can retain students as active until their Fees and Wallet balances are either paid off or refunded. By default, we deactivate any students who are not in the file regardless of the balance.
If you have any questions related to this post or fees in general, please reach out to ask@pushcoin.com