Universities often face challenges in managing commission payments to agents, especially as they grow their international student recruitment efforts. SAMS Pay offers a robust solution designed to simplify this complex process. Firstly, let’s explore the common challenges faced with manual processes.
We all know that agents work hard to deliver enrolments, usually for the September intake (January intakes in Australia & NZ) and often start to send in claim lists as soon as the intake starts. This creates the first challenge. As soon as an agent sends in a claim, they expect payment to follow soon, or at least acknowledgement that the list has been received and is being investigated, even though universities have specific ‘census’ dates at which they start to look at the claims.
Many agents operate on the principle that if they deliver the list early, the university will look through it quicker. However, the list usually comes to the university in the form of an email. So, who’s looking at the emails? Experience suggests that the ‘commission’ mailbox gets bloated with submissions and several ‘chasers’ long before the census date, and no one is looking through them. This can lead to frustration on the part of the agent as they are counting down the days to payment, but payment is a long way off, as processing hasn’t even begun. This leads to further chasers and the ‘merry-go-round’ keeps turning.
Now let’s consider the reconciliation process. Most universities that have a manual process, will rely on spreadsheets. These can be very basic or extremely convoluted. Producing a simple spreadsheet with all the relevant data is not that easy. Often enrolment data doesn’t sit neatly next to tuition fees or scholarship amounts or deposits paid. These must be brough together from a variety of sources to finally arrive at a version that ‘looks okay’.
Staff involved in the manual process, often are not the people who set the commission structure, which means there is a twice-a-year (or more) ‘re-learning’ of what the commission structure is and further checks and confirmations that the structure hasn’t changed, for any region, agent, course or tier.
All this copying and pasting; checking and re-checking can lead to errors. And that is the key fear. Is the commission figure correct? Does it look like last year? Did the tuition fees get changed? Did the scholarship amounts go up or down? Was there a change in the deposit amounts set, to trigger commission? Did the agent reach the next tier threshold? And so on. Experience has shown that universities can, and have, paid commissions to the wrong agent or the wrong amount or paid commission when they simply should not have paid at all. But wait, what about cases where more than one agent is claiming for the same student? How is that managed?
Once universities manage to get to a stage where they believe the list is confirmed, then starts the negotiation with agents. In almost every commission ‘run’ there are cases where agents don’t agree with the final calculation, resulting in numerous emails back and forth, with dubious pieces of evidence being attached to strengthen claims. Meanwhile the weeks are passing by, creating delays for all agents.
Finally, let’s consider the team. While the ‘commission person’ is dealing with the claims, agents are being pushed by recruitment staff to review the pipeline for the next intake, plan activities and start promoting. Inevitably commission claims become a topic of discussion and often staff have no idea where along the process the claim is. This leads to internal emails and messages between staff, chasing claims (on behalf of their agents), all leading to frustration spilling over on all fronts.
So, how does SAMS Pay help. It gives universities three things:
- Control
- Accuracy
- Transparency
Control, by ensuring all agents are given clear rules around the census date and asked to upload their lists to the system ahead of the deadline set by the university. As it is a cloud-based portal, agents can clearly see when lists can be uploaded and when the list will be closed. Template emails sent and stored in the system means that all agents get the same message, and these messages are visible by anyone who has access to the system.
Accuracy, by ensuring the commission structures are pre-built into the system with every possible rule and nuance pre-determined, ensuring an accurate calculation every time. No matter how complex the structure, with specific rules for regions, courses, agents (bespoke rates), gross or nett calculations, including or excluding bench fees, or any other variation a university has created, SAMS Pay can handle the calculations, at the push of a single button.
Transparency, by ensuring all statuses, actions, tasks, emails and messages are visible to staff (with access level restrictions and allowances) and agents. Anyone can pick up a claim and know exactly where it is in the process and what (if anything) is causing the claim to stall. At every stall, messages are sent to the relevant staff (as pre-determined by the university) to help resolve and query.
SAMS pay has been developed with the University of Central Lancashire (in the UK) and has been continually updated as new clients are onboarded. The system is designed to ensure fast and efficient processing of commissions, resulting in faster payouts and happier, more cordial relations between universities and agents.