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.
Comments
Claire Stevens (not verified)
Question: will the signing-in process be simplified? Because the current signing-in process is way too complicated and prone to error. Plus, when parents have problems signing in, your landing page says to contact the school for a resolution, which we can't give them.
sims-admin
Hi Claire, many thanks for getting in touch. By the end of this season we will be simplifying the registration process that provides the logins for SIMS Pay and other services. While we will continue to support third-party accounts for those who wish to use them, we will also provide the ability for parents to register with an email address and password of their own choice. This will allow us to better serve customers who need to recover their account. It will also empower schools to be able to directly support parents, should they wish to, something that is not currently possible.
Chris Willimsky (not verified)
Are you planning to introduce the ability to account for VAT when SIMS Pay makes automatic entries in SIMS FMS? The automatic entries in the accounting system save loads of time, but most of this is lost when we have to look through all meals income and enter corrections for the VAT on adult meals.
Capita SIMS
Hi Chris, many thanks for getting in touch. At present, FMS can only handle the data sent from SIMS Pay, so accounting for VAT when automatic entries are carried over would require a change to the way meals are recorded in SIMS Pay. At the moment, there are no immediate plans to add this functionality, although our product roadmap is influenced by customer feedback, so if there was sufficient demand, we would then be in a position to consider it.
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