A parent can stop a bank payment. Pre-authorised debit, EFT, a cheque — any of them can be stopped, and once it is, the money is gone. There is no process to argue through. The school's options are a collection agency or a write-off, and neither of those recovers a term's tuition.
A credit card charge does not work that way. To get the money back, the parent has to raise a chargeback, and a chargeback can be disputed.
TUIO fights the chargeback for you
This is the part most schools do not know when they weigh up card fees.
When a parent charges back a tuition payment, the banks run a defined dispute process, and that process accepts evidence. With the signed enrolment agreement and proof of what the parent agreed to pay, TUIO files the dispute on the school's behalf and recovers the funds. Our support team has a track record of doing exactly that in the rare cases a chargeback occurs.
The school does not manage the dispute, assemble the file, or talk to a bank. It sends the agreement, and TUIO handles the rest.
That single difference is worth more than the fee to most schools, because the cases where it matters are the large ones — the non-refundable deposit, the term paid in advance, the family that leaves mid-year.
What else changes when you take cards
Card payments do not come back NSF. A bank payment can bounce for insufficient funds and needs chasing. A card is authorised or it is not, and you know within seconds.
Families pay on time even in a bad month. When money is tight in a given month, a parent with a card can finance the tuition themselves instead of leaving the school out of pocket for three weeks. That is a real cash-flow gain and it costs the school nothing.
Nobody chases anybody. Families are set up on pre-authorised payment and the card is charged on schedule. No repeated emails, no awkward conversation at pick-up.
The money lands in the school's own account. Payouts start at 5 business days for pre-authorized debit and 3 for cards. After three months of processing with TUIO, you can apply to move to next business day.
Reconciliation stops being a monthly job. Each payment is matched to the family's invoice and marked paid automatically. Deposit reports show what is landing in the bank account, so the bookkeeper and the board see the same numbers you do.
What about the fee?
Card brands charge a fee to accept their cards.
Two ways to handle it.
Charge a service fee. The parent who chooses to use a card covers its cost. Parents do not love an add-on charge, but a meaningful share of them will use the card anyway — and if they are paying for it on their own dime, there is no reason to refuse them.
Build it into your fee schedule. This is the better answer, and it is what almost every other business does. You are not charged more for using a card at the supermarket; the shelf price already assumes you might. Set the tuition schedule on the same basis and the fee stops being a line item anybody argues about. People dislike add-on fees far more than they dislike a price.
Many schools do the first in year one and move to the second as they see what proportion of families actually use a card. Either way the choice is the school's, on both bank and card payments.
You do not need a terminal
There is no machine to buy and no queue of parents at the office door.
Families enter their own card details in the parent portal, and the card is charged on the schedule you set. The details are typed into the payment processor's secure form embedded in the TUIO page and go straight to the processor's vault — TUIO never collects, transmits or stores them. That is what keeps the school in SAQ-A, the simplest category of PCI compliance, and the processors themselves are certified PCI DSS Level 1. Student and family records are held in Canada, on AWS.
Support is unlimited, included on every plan, and covers families as well as staff, Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 21:00 Eastern. When a parent's card is declined, they contact TUIO.
The decision
Offering a card option costs a percentage. It buys faster payment, fewer bounced payments, no chasing, and a route to recover money when a family walks away from an agreement they signed.
Book a demo and we will walk through what it looks like for your fee schedule.
