Long Bay College share their experience with using Kindo to reduce administration and streamline student payments. It’s been a big hit, achieving those goals and tackling some other issues as well…
“Kindo has streamlined student payment transactions and saved countless hours of administration. It has improved revenue collection and provided a new income stream offering a simple tax gifting option.”
Long Bay College on Auckland's North Shore has used Kindo since the beginning of 2022 and are already seeing measurable results with significant time savings and revenue generation.
With a school role of 1500 students, their Business Manager Richard Beechey was looking for a solution that would simplify their administration and payments processing and potentially be flexible enough to solve some additional requirements specific to their needs.
Long Bay required an integrated solution for collecting sports fees, school donations, school trip fees, school lunch payments and other expenses.
Making life easier for parents…
Beechey had used Kindo as a parent and board member of a local Primary and Intermediate School. His hands-on positive user experience with Kindo led him to introduce Kindo to Long Bay College. Most of the Primary and Intermediate Schools feeding into Long Bay use Kindo, so for parents it offers a seamless transition.
Approximately 90% of families use Kindo and it allows parents with children at multiple schools to work from one portal, a feature that makes juggling school life that much simpler. Even more efficient for parents was the display of outstanding payment requests, alongside school shop items, so just one login offers all they need to transact with the school.
Early days with many more opportunities…
Kindo has been in place for less than 12 months and it is only the beginning for Long Bay College. Additional opportunities to save time and offer bespoke solutions have already been identified. The Kindo team have just delivered more functionality that will continue to change the way the school does business including managing International Student Contingency Funds and assisting with reporting for the Board.
“Kindo works closely with us to define and develop functionalities that are useful for High Schools. From importing Kamar Groups for billing, creating a solution to simplify International Student Contingency Funds management, to Xero integration. A great example of this is the data Kindo pulls together in seconds which can be used for Board reporting, that data collection used to take hours”.
Four times the revenue from a single email…
Long Bay is still getting to know the many functionalities available on Kindo but one example really stands out.
While testing the Payments reminder option, they sent one simple email reminding parents they had outstanding fees. This automated, “one-click” bulk email generated over four times the revenue received in the previous week in just 24 hours. Kindo makes it simple to view outstanding amounts and generates an email that sends a reminder all at once, with a customised link to log in for each family.
The school donation tax rebate gifting feature has also proved a simple but effective way to attract a new revenue stream for the school for years to come, adding 33-40% more to the value of the original donation.
Exceptional onboarding…
Everyone, parents, teachers, students, and school staff have all had to deal with a huge amount of change due to the Covid lockdowns and subsequent online/technology developments implemented across schools. Learning a new system or process, especially when it involves technology can be daunting. Natalee Hartnell, Payments Manager, has worked at Long Bay for the last twenty years and was quite apprehensive at the thought of using a new software system, but is now completely on board and a big advocate.
“I wasn’t looking forward to learning a new system and how to make it work, but the team at Kindo have been superb. They were always there to answer my questions and their online support was great. It’s not just the difference Kindo has made to the school that means we’ll keep working with them. It’s the level of care, commitment and support they deliver. Just do it – you won’t regret it.”
