Starting the New Year with a fresh approach and appearance can be a great way to kickstart the coming months and take things to a new level.

In its current guise, SIMS Agora helps schools cut down unnecessary administration time, streamlining the processing of payments and helping provide an easy-to-use, online solution that offers parents an excellent experience.

A fresh face for our payment solution

None of that functionality which schools have come to rely on is changing.

We are however changing the product’s name to SIMS Pay.

The name change will occur in February and is part of our ongoing commitment to simplify our services and make it easier for school staff, their parents and partners to use our services.

SIMS Pay will reduce school payment administration and continue to offer secure, seamless payment experiences for your parents and staff.

Initially the refresh may appear lightweight to existing users and that’s deliberate – we want to reaffirm that all the functionality used every day by SIMS Agora users will remain in SIMS Pay.

Introducing SIMS Pay

Once the new name has been adopted, we’ll update logos, product name references and the site’s URL. We will be redirecting existing users to the new site automatically so there is no need to update any of your bookmarks or processes. Although you may want to update any bookmarks you have after the change.

By changing the product name to SIMS Pay, we’re aiming to align our service with customer expectations so that we can equip schools with delivering cutting edge payment technology to their parents and employees. In essence, this should make it clearer to our customers and users what the main function of the product is: helping schools facilitate payments with ease.

Increased integration with SIMS Parent

We’ll also be releasing the integration between SIMS Pay and SIMS Parent in February; kick-starting the next phase of the work on our parental engagement product and service consolidation. By doing this, we’ll be providing schools with access to both services the ability to provide their parents with one interface for payment needs, upcoming events and keeping up-to-date with their child’s progress within school.

This deeper integration forms part of our vision for engagement strategy, a subject you can learn more about by reading our this blog from our Head of Engagement, Abdul Ghafoor, or by catching up with Abdul’s webinar on the subject (you’ll just need to register a few details to access the webinar on demand).

Also in February, you’ll see that we’re expanding your school shop to allow you to create products for employees to purchase items or track interest. For example, this could be something along the lines of purchasing their staff ski trip jumper or tracking interest in an upcoming staff event.

This functionality will provide schools with the ability to collect payments from employees. Should you be required to account for VAT in these purchases you will need to account for these in your respective accounting software – you can utilise our reports to create an understanding of products purchased by employees and their respective income over a period of time, providing full transparency in your accounting.

Find out more about SIMS Pay

We’re excited about these new developments and it promises to be an exciting year for SIMS Pay.

As the changes to SIMS Pay arise, we’ll contact our customers and users with further information. If you’d like to know more about the existing SIMS Agora ahead of the refresh, visit our dedicated web page or take a look at this case study at West Bridgford School to see the product in action.