Public Tuition Payment Portal
About the public payment portal
This enhancement is part of a future release, and not yet live in the system.
If you’ve configured an integration with a payment processor, students can pay their bills by logging in to Campus Cafe. If you use the Stripe integration, you can also collect payments through a public website that doesn’t require a username and password. In this way, anyone can pay the bill for a student as long as they know the student’s full name and student ID number and the payment information will flow into Campus Cafe. The person paying won’t be able to see any billing or academic information about the student. Nor will they receive a payment confirmation email.
The public payment portal can be used only to pay for tuition for courses. Application fees, housing fees, and tuition deposits cannot be submitted using the portal.
Prerequisites
This feature works only with Stripe. Authorize.net and PayPal aren’t supported.
Configure integration with payment processor Stripe.
For miscellaneous payments, for Campus Cafe to automatically offset the payment, the transaction code must have Activate Cash Preset Distribution AutoFill selected and Preset Distributions selected.
Required permissions
Module | Number | Description |
|---|---|---|
System Admin | 293 | Turn on public payment portal |
Set a transaction fee
If you incur charges to process credit cards, you may wish to pass some or all of these charges along to the person making the payment. Often known as convenience fees or transaction charges, if you turn these on in Campus Cafe, they will apply to all payments collected, not only those payments collected through the public payment portal.
You set up convenience fees when you configure your Stripe integration with Campus Cafe. Controlled by Custom Control PAYCONVFEE Sequence 1, Parameter Values 1 and 2, fees can be either a percentage of the transaction or a flat fee.
Turn on public payment portal
You decide whether your institution will accept payments without the payer needing to log in to Campus Cafe. You may wish to restrict payments to people with usernames and passwords to minimize payment errors or reduce fraud. Alternatively, you can allow a payment without the need to log in. You might allow this if you have many people such as parents or corporate sponsors paying the bills for your students.
To allow a public payment page follow the below steps.
Go to Admin > Custom Control.
In Search enter WEBPAYMENT.
Next to WEBPAYMENT Seq Num 5, Parm 1 click the pencil.
In Parameter Value 1 enter Y.
Click Save.
Go to Admin > Refresh Data Cache.
Submitting payment through the portal
To pay a student’s tuition, the person paying must know the student’s ID number and name.
The person paying the bill goes to your public payment portal web address.
Enter the student’s Campus Cafe ID number.
Enter the student’s legal or preferred first name. This must match the name exactly as it appears in Campus Cafe. Be cautious if using a preferred name. The student may use the preferred name collegially but never recorded it in Campus Cafe. When in doubt, use the legal name.
Enter the student’s legal last name. This must match the name exactly as it appears in Campus Cafe. For example “De Wolf” is different from “DeWolf”.
Enter the amount to pay.
The payer is brought to a confirmation screen where they can adjust the amount before clicking Pay to continue to entering payment information.
They payer is then asked to enter their payment information such as their credit card information before they Submit Payment.
Access payment portal
Individuals looking to pay using the portal can use any browser and enter the following web address, replacing ABC with your school code.
https://ABC-web.scansoftware.com/cafeweb/tapestry?service=external/MakePaymentPage&reset=true&mode=1
Troubleshoot page disabled error
If someone trying to pay a bill for a student encounters the error “this page is disabled” it means you haven’t configured Stripe as your payment processor.
Check your Stripe configuration, including that Custom Control WEBPAYMENT Seq Num 2, Parameter Value 4 is set to STRIPE_FORM.
Go to Admin > Custom Control.
In Search enter WEBPAYMENT.
Next to WEBPAYMENT Seq Num 2, Parm 4 click the pencil.
In Parameter Value 1 enter STRIPE_FORM.
Click Save.
Next steps
Payments received go to Campus Cafe cash batch for posting to student ledgers. Until then students won’t see the payment applied on their bills. Campus Cafe will associate the payment with the transaction code you configured as part of your Stripe integration configuration.
Related content
