Stanislaus Central CashNet for Multiple Campuses

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.

1.  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 - see below

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.

Follow-up question w/CashNet rep regarding retail terminals:

Q.  I have a question about how “Retail Terminals” could be configured that would enable payments to go to different bank accounts.  Basically, we are having some difficulty figuring out the reconciliation process, whereby we have all payment go to a single bank account, that would then need to be reconciled and paid out to individual campuses.  Ideally, we’d be able to, in a single e-market, configure the e-market in such a way that charges paid for a Northridge charge were paid to a Northridge bank account, a San Jose charge was paid to a San Jose bank account, etc.  Does that make sense?  Can you give me some more information about retail terminals, and whether we could configure an emarket to send certain types of transactions to different bank accounts?

A.  

I’m not sure of the configuration you're referring to, because in Cashnet a single eMarket can have only a single credit card terminal (although a different terminal can be identified for iPad usage).  Also, retail terminals are generally used for cashiering, and it is possible to have multiple retail terminals one each by station, and the cashier would log into the corresponding station. 

If the plan is to use a single eMarket checkout (within CSUIP’s Cashnet database), then it would be a single ecommerce credit card terminal. It would be up to CSU to disburse funds from the single larger account to the individual school’s bank accounts outside of Cashnet. 

Within Cashnet if you are able to send different item codes per campus, or some other campus identifier reference, you would easily be able to run reports in Cashnet to determine which funds belong to which campus.  Alternatively, if reconciliation is a big concern, to make it absolutely distinct, they could opt for an eMarket license for each campus, whereby each eMarket would have the individual schools credit card terminal configured.  As you know this will cost quite a bit more because a license is needed at each site, and will take longer to deploy.