Author: Richard Clayton, HE Practice Lead, Namos Solutions
Wow, you have made it through to the third and final (can’t promise that!) instalment of this blog series.
So far we have had poetry from Kipling, quotes from Churchill and now… delinquency scoring strategies on students. If you feel as let down as you did when you watched the final Game of Thrones, I apologise in advance.
AR & Collections
HE collections strategies is a blog in its own right! However, before you start systematising bad practices, ask yourself some fundamental questions…
- What Student Welfare support do you have? Do you want to have the system point to this support at pre-delinquency stage? This has only been possible since 20C.
- How can you rationalise and formalise Student debt chasing approaches? If a student hasn’t paid after 30, 60 and 90 day scheduled chases, will it matter what score is assigned in the system, manual intervention may be required. Have the system, change the strategy at a logical point to ensure face-to-face support is offered.
- How do you identify SLC funded students and ensure your Student Records Systems keeps them out of the scope of debt chasing?
- How do you identify students who are sponsored by a legitimate third party as opposed to just being funded by parents?
- What is the earliest stage you may wish to take fees from a Student? Ensure the customer set up is triggered early enough to allow for deposits, visa fees, or pre-sessional courses.
Tax
Let’s dispel a myth, there is no one size fits all solution to tax in Higher Education. If anyone offers you this magic bullet, I would urge you to explain your existing tax rules for partial exemption and withholding, recovery, exceptions (and evidencing thereof), international, tax journaling etc. If the person you tell this to is nodding rather than giving you consultancy, they are likely to be a Sales person rather than a Tax Accountant!
Namos have implemented tax in multiple sectors, industries, countries and even Higher Education multiple times. We have never been able to fully ‘lift and shift’ from one client to another. That being said, tax will come down to 4Ps of Party, Product, Process and Place, i.e. what is the registration status of the party, what product does it relate to, what process brought about the transaction in what place (geography) for input or output tax. At Namos we now have templates we start from… and also have partners who are International Tax Experts.
Customers should spend time on their Tax Matrices upfront. List the registration statuses, services/products, geographies, and the tax handling that needs to be applied with which exceptions. It will be a pareto whereby 80% of scenarios will be met by 20% of the determination rules.
Close
I hope you have found this blog series useful.
There are certainly other considerations across; PreAward (Grants, Awards, Contracts), Expenses, Fixed Assets, Intercompany, Advanced Procurement (Sourcing, Qualification, Portal) etc. However, I will return to an earlier statement, the fun challenge with digital disruption leading business transformation is one of Change Management in Higher Education.
There are 4Ps to these projects; People, Processes, technology Platforms and Partners. If you choose Oracle Cloud, your achievement will not be getting the technology platform to work (thousands of customers and millions of users show the technology works!), it will be getting your people to work with it and embrace standardised processes aligned to best practice.
You could consider a technology solution to these people challenges, certainly Oracle Guided Learning and Digital Assistant would help adoption. However, in my experience, there is no substitute for a partner who is willing to go the extra mile for you. If you want one of those, please get in touch.
Join us again next month, when we’ll be exploring the world of Managed Services with our Managed Services Delivery Lead, Adam Maxwell!
About Namos Solutions
Namos Solutions are an award-winning Oracle OPN Modernised Partner specialising in the implementation and support of ERP, EPM and HCM business solutions, both in the Cloud and on-premise.
Although based in central London, we work wherever our clients need us to be. Many leading organisations located all over the world trust and rely on our expertise to deliver industry-leading business solutions. Namos customers can currently be found in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and Africa.
For more information, please visit www.namossolutions.com or email info@namossolutions.com.
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