The Direct Debit function allows you to quickly and easily take payments from parents and automatically update the parent’s account. It saves a lot of administrative work and reduces the likelihood of bad debt building up.

To be able to use this function you will need to register for Direct Debit. Contact support@smartfees.com.au for more information.

Setting up Parents

Running a Direct Debit Batch

The Payment Process explained

After a payment batch is submitted it takes up to 90 minutes for the intial process to complete. You will receive an email from the payment processor Childcare Easypay once that has happened. The batch will also show as processed on the DD batch screen.

The intial processing step verifies the details match what is recorded. It also performs other steps depending on the payment method:

  • For credit / debit card payments funds are also verifed and you can be confident the payment will complete as planned if it passes this step. Once a payment has successfully passed this step it is recorded on the parent balance.

  • For bank account payments the process is more complicated because settlement takes 3 banking days (usually !) and only failed payments are notifed. To cater for this situation we record the payment on the parent account as soon as it has passed intial processing successfully but if it subsequently fails we automatically post a reversal on the parents account. You (and the parent) will see the payment and the reversal appear on the account in this instance together with any failure message such as ‘insufficent funds’.

If you are generating statements after payments and want to ensure the payments are reflected on the statement you must ensure two things:

  1. Wait until you have received notification that the batch has processed or it shows as processed on the DD Batch screen.
  2. Ensure that the statement date range you select includes the date of the DD batch run.