Challenge
Founded in 1888, PLC Sydney serves over 1,400 students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, and offers boarding for upper-grade students. To better serve the busy parents who comprise its customer base, PLC Sydney needed a flexible, user-friendly system that offered a simple way for parents to pay tuition fees and other expenses – such as events, activities, sports, and camps – which entailed both recurring and one-off payments. Prior to working with Stripe, PLC Sydney used disparate solutions to collect various types of payments, resulting in a complicated system that proved tedious and labour-intensive to manage.
The school sought a more efficient solution that would allow it to easily collect funds for a variety of payment types, automatically reconcile them, and route them to the correct business unit. It also wanted an easy way to collect donations from parents and the broader community.
Solution
PLC Sydney chose Stripe as its new payments solution because of the flexibility it could provide for parents, its ease of use for school staff, and its ease of integration with other tools. The school partnered with Vertic to assist with implementation and project management. Vertic built the user experience for the solution on Salesforce Experience Cloud, which orchestrates the flow of data between Stripe and MYOB Advanced, the school's existing ERP solution.
To complete the integration, Vertic worked closely with the Stripe professional services team. The professional services team responded quickly to troubleshoot issues and resolve Vertic’s questions throughout the process, helped navigate reporting challenges, and hosted several training sessions to prepare PLC Sydney for running day-to-day operations on Stripe.
With Stripe solutions such as Payments and Billing, PLC Sydney launched an improved payments experience for parents with added payment options, such as making payments for excursions, school activities, and optional donations and a simple way to pay multiple invoices or expenses at once, or to set up recurring payments for ongoing expenses. The system also allows PLC Sydney to collect donations and drive fundraising efforts for specific goals. Additionally, the school uses Connect to distribute funds to different business units.
Results
Stripe and Vertic helped PLC Sydney elevate its customer experience through new flexible payment options and a simple, easy-to-use interface, which has garnered praise from parents. The school’s checkout now allows people to not only pay their bills, but also make donations, which has led to an increase in donor funds.
A streamlined payments system has enabled PLC Sydney to easily consolidate and centralise payments from various sources, including tuition, donations, and excursions, and distribute funds to the correct business units. Automatic reconciliation has increased staff efficiency, resulting in an 80% reduction in work hours devoted to reconciliation per month, while reducing reporting errors.
Working with Stripe and Vertic was the best custom-dev experience I’ve had in 25 years. We had high expectations because we knew what Stripe could do, and we were still surprised to get exactly what we wanted.
About Partner
Vertic, an Australia-based digital consulting firm and Salesforce and Stripe partner, empowers customer-focused and digitally ambitious organisations to transform themselves with relevance, empathy, and ultimately, organisational success.
Stripe helps us build and deliver the advanced solutions our clients need. In working with the Stripe professional services team, we were able to collaborate closely and keep the project on track.
