Q&A w/Delfin Guillory at Stanislaus about their integration that enables transactions from multiple campuses paying for parking passes through Stanislaus. Stanislaus handles payments for parking passes for CSU Monterey Bay and other Higher Education institutions in the area.
- How are charges paid out and reconciled between campuses?
Each campus has its own payment interface and web page, but all transactions go through a single CashNet database and bank account owned by Stanislaus. Shibboleth is used to authenticate users. At least once a month, payments that need to be distributed to other campuses are reconciled and posted to individual campus bank accounts. Reconciliation amounts are determined by CashNet reports. We have MOUs and charge other campuses a fee to provide this service of handling parking tickets and permits. The act of reconciling charges to other campuses is a fairly time consuming process for Stanislaus, hence the fee charged to individual campuses.
2. Is it possible to enable payments to go to multiple different accounts, so that reconciliation and transfer doesn't have to occur manually?
Possibly. There are two different payment types used through eMarket:
- SmartPay - filtered back through CashNet, ACH the money through SmartPay back into bank account - only a single bank account could be used
- retail terminal
- Stanislaus uses Elavon as a credit card type for its retail terminal. You could possibly have a credit card type for each campus that would direct it back to their account. Would have to absorb that fee or charge back to the customer. In theory, each credit card terminal can be designed to be sent to a specific bank account. One potential drawback is that other credit card processors like Elevon introduces higher fees than SmartPay.
- Lauren Magnuson (Unlicensed) is following up w/CashNet about retail terminal configuration
3. How long did the current integration take to set up the web portal with CashNet, and how many personnel were involved in development?
- three IT staff involved
- Beginning to end - approximately six months to get to production.
4. How is accounting handled for auditing purposes?
Because each campus has its own web portal, individual dollar amounts paid can be reported out by campus. On the auditing side, we keep records of all transactions that filter down through a general ledger. All money is in a liability account and paid out through liability, as it's not funds for our own campus.