Elevating the parent experience through billing and payments at Dharma Kids Center

Center Name: Dharma Kids Center | Location: Burnaby, BC

THE CHALLENGE

Wasting time on payments collections conversations

Located in Burnaby, British Columbia, Dharma Kids Center was founded by Yvonne Somji – a mother of 3 boys with a great passion for children. After over 27 years of running the center, Somji decided to pass down the family tradition to her son and daughter-in-law, Jav Somji and Megan Llorente.

When Llorente took over as a co-owner, she quickly saw the opportunity to make process improvements – especially an opportunity to reduce the 10+ hours a month that was spent on billing administration. The process Llorente inherited resulted in lots of paperwork and required hours of follow-ups every month to collect parents’ payments. She found that talking about payments with families could be an awkward and time-consuming experience for everyone and took time away from more impactful work that happens within the center. After implementing HiMama’s parent communication solution at the center in 2019, Llorente realized she could also use the app to create a more seamless payment experience for both her families and herself.

THE SOLUTION

Handling payment in HiMama to make tuition management easier on everyone

Once she saw how much parents enjoyed using HiMama, Llorente knew she could take advantage of the app to send families’ monthly tuition bills and collect payments in a more seamless, automatic way. With this feature, parents would receive bills and make tuition payments in the same place they received daily updates about their kids, all while making it easy for Llorente to collect and track their payments. As a majority of millennial parents are already paying more than half of their bills digitally, these automatic payments offered an opportunity for Llorente to provide parents with an easier way to pay tuition fees, ultimately leading to a better overall experience for families.   

Did you know? 

• 88% of parents depend on technology to make finance management easier
• 46% of parents use autopay at least sometimes
• 42.5% of parents use autopay for everything

For Llorente, the whole implementation process was actually easier than anticipated. 

I started off by explaining the process in steps while allowing parents to ask questions along the way. It can be intimidating to bring in technology at first, but helping parents understand that these tools are in place to make things easier is extremely important. 

Megan Llorente

At the start of a new school year, she rolled out the changes so that she would have the opportunity to set new expectations about the center’s payment policies. After giving parents the chance to warm up to the new payment system, she started requiring that parents set up automatic payments in their HiMama accounts. Her families liked not having to remember to send payments themselves, and Llorente was delighted to see more payments coming in on time with no added effort from her. 

THE RESULT

Less collections conversations and more happy parents at Dharma Kids

Pretty much all of my families are on automatic payment, and it means I don’t have to have any collection conversations. Everything’s automatic. I just see the payments come in, and now I’m down to spending one or two hours a month on billing administration, which is a huge time change.

Megan Llorente

Today, new parents are introduced to HiMama Payments right as they join Dharma Kids Center. With only a couple of exceptions, all parents are now enrolled in automatic payments with the app, making billing extremely convenient and efficient for both Llorente and her families. This new change helped Llorente drastically reduce the time she spends on admin tasks while providing a clear process for parents making tuition payments. Overall, her families have loved having the financial aspect of joining the center made so simple. 

Making things easy benefits everyone at the center  – that trickles down to our families, educators, and most importantly the kids.

Megan Llorente

Make payments easier for parents by using HiMama’s seamless all-in-one system

Using the right tools in HiMama, you can improve your payment collection processes and avoid those awkward collection conversations, while providing the best possible experience for your families. 

If you’re interested in learning more about billing and payment collection in HiMama, click here to see how it all works!

Dharma Kids Center is one of many HiMama customers who have saved more than a full day’s work with HiMama’s billing and payments platform. Fill out the form below to learn more about how our billing and payments feature can help you!