The Challenge
Students at University of Wyoming (UW) received their bills via United States Postal Service. The process of disbursing student bills was accomplished with the help of a local company that processed, printed and mailed out student bills. This inconvenient and costly process required UW to drive cases of envelopes to the outsourcing company along with paying for template programming fees, paper handling fees and postage. The billing file would be sent via secure FTP and then processed, printed, stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. This process could take 2-3 days before the bills made it into the mail system that meant it took a week before the students received the bills. Legally, students must receive their bills at least two weeks before the bill due date which meant timing and costs became a large concern with this complicated process.
The Solution
UW implemented Electronic Billing (E-Billing) by implementing Evisions’ FormFusion, a document management solution, with its Script Directory module. When Evisions released the PL-SQL Script Director module for FormFusion, UW saw it as an opportunity to save approx. $45,000 annually, as well as simplifying the student bill process and providing a better level of service to its students. The FormFusion PL-SQL Script Director optional module enabled UW to present their FormFusion output directly to their students as a PDF through Banner Self Service or Luminis software. This eliminated printing and reprinting, saved on the cost of paper, toner, envelopes and postage, and the time spent printing or in UW’s case the time spent waiting on an outsourcing company.
UW started working on the implementation of the PL-SQL Script Director module on February 1, 2009 and went live with E-Bills on March 6, 2009 and has not looked back since. Today, UW processes up to 10,000 student bills on a monthly basis. The file is processed through Banner Job Submission. FormFusion then picks up the file, processes it, sends a PDF of each student bill to Luminis through the PL-SQL Script Director module and sends out an email via the FormFusion Email Module to each student letting them know their bill is available.
Students can respond directly to the email if they see a problem or call the Accounts Receivable office. E-Billing allows UW to receive payments faster and has lowered the amount of errors. In addition, Luminis holds the bills for 1 year for tax purposes and the students have full access to them. This helps cut down on the amount of students asking for reprints and the time consuming task of getting that information from Banner.
UW made E-Bills mandatory for its students and through a survey found that over 90% of its students were happier with this process. A printer is available in UW’s Accounts Receivable office where students can come and print their bills if they do not have access to a printer, but only 10 students have used this service! Less than 500 bills are being printed today and those are bills for former students who are no longer enrolled at UW and no longer have University email or Luminis access. Additionally, students have the ability to pay their bills on-line through CASHNet. Within Luminis, a credit card icon leads them to a CASHNet online payment module. The entire process is simple, drastically helped the budget and has given students 24/7 access to their billing statements and online payments.
“From development to production, implementation took only 4 weeks and has saved us so much time and money.”
“We used to print up to 10,000 bills a month and use an outsourcing company to send them out. With FormFusion, we now print fewer than 500 bills a month and have saved a ton in printing and postage.”
“E-bills are now mandatory for students and in a survey we have found that students are happier with getting their bills via email rather than in the mail.”