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Principals Today magazine featured information from interviews with Paparoa Street School, Te Ra Waldorf School (& Proprietors Trust), Raumati Beach School, Belmont Intermediate and Vauxhall Schools – as they shared their experience with Kindo for simplifying the traditionally stressful back to school period. Click here to view PDF.

Disruptive technology often creates a plethora of downstream effects, but for schools using the new Payables functionality from school payments platform, Kindo, it looks like a good news story.  Kindo is simplifying the traditionally stressful period at the start of the year for school admin teams dealing with new students settling in, Student Management Systems to update, and camp and sports team forms and payments to chase up.

We talked to a number of schools using Kindo Payables to find out what the term one rush looks like — before and after Kindo.

Camille Lamond, office administrator at Paparoa Street Primary in Christchurch admits to being ‘a little nervous’ at the thought of introducing a new system but her fears were soon put to rest.  The ability to easily invoice items to an individual class or year and set up groups for specific payments like sports team transport has really cut down the usual start of year admin burden.

Increased visibility over what has been paid and what is owing has been a plus at Te Ra Waldorf School in Paraparaumu.  Executive Officer, Rhonda Huntley, feels that providing school families with the ability to part pay larger sums like camp fees, with Kindo continuously displaying the updated balance, offers a practical way to support parents and caregivers.

“In 2019, for the first time we had 100% of our swimming bill paid before the due date and camp was fully paid before the students set off.  Kindo also makes it really easy to have an empathetic conversation about amounts owing with parents because everything is so transparent” said Rhonda.

During 2020, the benefits of Kindo became even more pronounced in two areas. In terms of communication, having school families directly linked into Payables for both the school and its Proprietor Trust was very helpful. “We were able to clearly communicate with families around their payables and make adjustments as required for individual family situations affected by job losses due to COVID.”

More surprisingly, Te Ra has hit its 2020 budget targets despite COVID, exceeding budget for donations by a massive 12.5%.

Continue reading Principals Today: Technology disrupts ‘normal’ start to school year