TADS

Enrollment to Tuition Management in One Step

TADS — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:26:43 +0000

We have rolled out a new, oft-requested feature for our enrollment and billing management customers: Schools now have the option of presenting tuition billing immediately after families complete the enrollment stage. In the past, schools had to wait for a student to be enrolled before completing the billing contract, but now you have the option of pre-building contracts for the family. If there are multiple students from one family attending your school, the system knows to not present the billing contract until all students have completed enrollment. Likewise, if a family selects to apply for financial aid, the billing contract will not be available until the financial aid amount is determined.

Let us know if you have questions or feedback about this new feature, we are excited to bring this to our schools!

TADS Financial Aid 2.0

TADS — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:58:25 +0000

We are happy to announce that beta testing for our new TADS Financial Aid Version 2.0 has begun! With our many releases, continuous tweaking and extensive features built into our current Financial Aid product, this rewrite has been quite the adventure.

The major developments so far have been bringing the data collection into our integrated environment alongside Admissions, Enrollment and Tuition Management, we’ve streamlined the application into fewer pages, given the ability to better jump from page to page and now allow users to pre-fill information before validation. We have also overhauled the help areas to include enhanced explanations, video walkthroughs and expanded livehelp options.

We have had a few schools express concern that the financial aid software and service they’ve experienced for years is going to change, but rest assured, the new platform will allow TADS to serve you and your families better than ever.

We’re excited because this is just the beginning! We’ll keep you posted as we progress through the beta stages of the new TADS Financial Aid.

TADS Welcomes the Archdiocese of San Francisco

TADS — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:03:20 +0000

We had a nice high-five moment around the office when the Archdiocese of San Francisco informed us that they would be using TADS to administer their financial aid programs!

From the Archdiocese of San Francisco:

The Archdiocese of San Francisco recently selected TADS as their Financial Aid Processor. A committee of school Financial Aid Directors and Business Managers researched four Financial Aid Processing Companies, and found that:

TADS has the fastest processing time
TADS has the best web platform
TADS has the best screens for both families and administrators; user friendly
TADS has a sophisticated and intuitive platform
TADS audits the financial statements of our families with a sophisticated system
TADS references in three dioceses nationwide gave TADS glowing recommendations

We are very excited to begin the process and look forward to providing excellent service and support for the upcoming years. Oh, and we all agreed that high-five moments make for great days!

New Tuition Management Customers

TADS — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:00:35 +0000

What a great summer we’ve had so far! Our Financial Aid Assessment and Admissions & Enrollment schools keep growing in number, and we’re very excited to see our Tuition Management service being adopted at such an amazing rate. If it’s one thing that we’ve proven again and again, TADS is a ‘once you see it‘ kind of product. School administrators are impressed enough by our service, reporting and flexibility to reconsider existing commitments, long histories and even bribes of tens of thousands of dollars from our competitors to move to our platform!

If you haven’t seen our Tuition Management service yet, do yourself, your school and your families a favor by scheduling a webinar with one of our product engineers.

Tuition Management in a Multi-Service World

TADS — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:59:35 +0000

We just came back from Washington DC where we were a major sponsor for the National Business Officers Association (NBOA) Symposium. We had a great many conversations with business officers from around the country, and one of the questions that came up more than once was whether or not schools could use TADS Tuition Management if they were using services like SSS by NAIS, FAST by ISM or any other service for their financial aid processes. We naturally responded with a resounding, “Yes, of course you can!”

We understand that certain services have strong regional presences or that schools have been using and are comfortable with what they have been doing forever. Because of that, we have many schools that use disparate services to administer various parts of school back offices; we take pride in being able to effectively use results from your other vendors to populate our services.

What does that mean for your school? If you have a spreadsheet of admissions/enrollment data from InfoSnap, financial aid results from SSS, information from Blackbaud or just a list of students put together by your staff, we can import that information into our tuition management and populate your billing agreements. Once students are in the back-end with this imported data, one click is all it takes to start the billing process. We make it easy to start using TADS!

Contracts and Customer Retention

TADS — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 22:11:47 +0000

Because of the, shall we say, interesting way some tuition management companies tie schools into their service, we often find ourselves in the strange situation of explaining the intricacies of contracts that are not our own.

We have found that some of our competitors’ contracts require schools to follow detailed and time-sensitive processes to change to TADS Tuition Management. If these procedures are not followed explicitly, schools are not be able to switch services until the next processing season, or pay a penalty of tens of thousands of dollars to do so (depending on expected revenue from your school).

So, that’s no fun. There’s a reason we say ‘TADS schools are happy schools’! Simply put, we’re here to serve you. Our retention rate is so exceptional because we offer a valuable service for a reasonable price, not because we keep schools tied to us under threat of penalty. We feel that if our service fails to meet client expectations, that client should be free to simply leave and use another. No service is going to fit every school 100%, but we take all feedback to heart and have been successful in partnering with institutions to their and our satisfaction.

New Financial Aid Reporting Interface Beta

TADS — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:45:06 +0000

We are happy to announce that our new Financial Aid reporting interface beta is available in the administrator back-end! This is a brand-new reporting interface that offers the ability for dynamic sorting, filtering, column inclusion/exclusion (separate from filtering), exporting, printing and more.

This is a beta version, so we are adding functionality and fixing bugs as we get feedback from our schools. We’ll be adding dynamic, real-time graphs and plenty more in the near future, so keep checking back!

If you wish to try it out, look for ‘Beta Reports’ in the Financial Aid administrator backend.

Free Enterprise-Level Email for Your School From Microsoft and Google

TADS — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:25:18 +0000

We deal with schools of all shapes and sizes that hold on to their internal (or cheaply hosted) email systems because it’s what they’ve always done and there’s been no clear, easy alternative. We know these systems can be expensive, time-consuming, untrustworthy, old and just plain troublesome. We’re here to say it really is ok to let those systems go quietly into the night… both Microsoft and Google offer hosted, free, enterprise-level email for schools. Worry not, there are easy migration tools for each system.

The Microsoft offering is called Live@edu and Google’s offering is called Google Apps for Education. Both systems let you pick and choose features including email and hosted applications for users campus-wide, from administrators to students and even alumni.

We love both technology and helping schools save time here at TADS, so to not pass this along would be criminal. Schools have saved many thousands of dollars per year on services, licenses and infrastructure by implementing these offerings.

Check out the links, ask us questions and get this process moving!

Blackbaud Data Interchange

TADS — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:29:51 +0000

TADS is happy to announce the ability to post transactions to Blackbaud’s student billing and GL modules from our Tuition and Billing Management interface.

We have more integrations planned for the near future, be sure to check back with us.

TADS Has a New Address

TADS — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:48:54 +0000

After enduring the last few years squeezed into our old offices, we have finally moved into our new space. While we’re only a few blocks from our old office and still close to Target Field in downtown Minneapolis, our new neighborhood is more active and we can enjoy the benefit of close businesses, colleges, parks and entertainment.

Feel free to stop by if you’re in the area!