TADS

Fund Management Updates

TADS — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:27:41 +0000

Many organizations administer funds whose recipients attend one of many regional or otherwise associated schools. One of the biggest challenges for proper fund disbursement is determining which school the student is attending (as many apply for multiple schools), making sure more than one school doesn’t claim the student, and checking on enrollment status throughout the year.

Some funds are required to verify enrollment just at the beginning of the year, while others are required to complete it by semester, quarter or even every month. With the new additions to our fund management interface, we are able to automate enrollment verification across all schools, greatly reducing administrative hassle for fund organizations and schools alike.

Admissions & Enrollment Enhancements

TADS — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:58:40 +0000

We’ve had many requests for enhancements to our Admissions & Enrollment products from schools, and subsequently, many mini-releases over the past few months. Our developers and product testers have been very busy!

Admissions & Enrollment additions or improvements:

Class size capacity control, targets and wait-list functionality
Override default enrollment fees on a per-student basis (see screenshot)
Unlimited sub-statuses for student progress through Admissions & Enrollment
Pre-agreement for electronic acceptance of contracts
Charged items can subtract from overall tuition cost in Tuition Management
Many enhancements aimed at national-standards for an online, electronically-signed agreement (more information on this coming soon!)
Updated ability to display tuition for student at the beginning of enrollment
Ability to complete tuition management agreement immediately after enrollment has been completed
Tax year reporting for family education
Many new reports, interface tweaks and minor changes

If you have any questions about how these or other Admissions & Enrollment enhancements can be applied to your school, please contact us.

TADS Financial Aid 2.0 Rollout

TADS — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:04:11 +0000

We are happy to announce that our new Financial Aid Version 2 has been rolled out to all schools and families with great success! We are continually adding new features to the interface thanks to the great feedback from schools and families. It is certainly getting positive reviews across the board.

Because of our tight integration with a certain School Information Software (SIS) package (info coming soon!), we now have a single-sign-in environment for all of our products (admissions, enrollment, billing and financial aid). As a result, families now have one place to log in for all services over the many years they are in pre-K to 12th grade, whether it’s only at your school or a number of different schools that use 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.