How to send fee balance reminders using an Excel file
Instead of sending a general message to all parents asking the to clear their fee balances, you want to send each parent a unique message showing exactly how much they owe the school and also provide instructions on how to pay.
For starters, we need an Excel file containing the fee balances for each student. The system expects your file to have at least three columns arranged in this order: student ID(or admission number), student name and fee balance amount as shown in the image below.
Fee balance reminders will not be sent to parents with overpayments(-ve balances) or zero balances. The three columns are mandatory but you can add as many more columns as needed to carry extra data.
Once your Excel file is ready, go to the 'Messages' section on the menu and select the 'Fee balances' option as highlighted in the image below. Proceed to drag-and-drop your Excel file onto the dotted area or click the 'Select Excel file' button to choose from your computer file system.
On the next step, you may need to match the columns in your Excel file to the student ID, name & fee balance amount columns that Sematime needs. You do this by clicking on the down arrow ⌄ and choosing the correct column name. Click 'Next' to proceed.
On this final step, enter an optional message that you want appended to each reminder. For example, a due date or instructions on how to pay. Click 'Send Balances' when finished.
After sending your message, you will get a delivery report summary. At first, all the messages will be in the 'Pending' status but will gradually get updated to either 'Delivered' or 'Failed' based on the delivery confirmation report we get from the mobile network operator e.g Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom etc.
You can then click on 'View Report' to see a detailed delivery report for each parent. Come with us to the next section to understand more about SMS message delivery reports.
For starters, we need an Excel file containing the fee balances for each student. The system expects your file to have at least three columns arranged in this order: student ID(or admission number), student name and fee balance amount as shown in the image below.
Fee balance reminders will not be sent to parents with overpayments(-ve balances) or zero balances. The three columns are mandatory but you can add as many more columns as needed to carry extra data.
Once your Excel file is ready, go to the 'Messages' section on the menu and select the 'Fee balances' option as highlighted in the image below. Proceed to drag-and-drop your Excel file onto the dotted area or click the 'Select Excel file' button to choose from your computer file system.
On the next step, you may need to match the columns in your Excel file to the student ID, name & fee balance amount columns that Sematime needs. You do this by clicking on the down arrow ⌄ and choosing the correct column name. Click 'Next' to proceed.
On this final step, enter an optional message that you want appended to each reminder. For example, a due date or instructions on how to pay. Click 'Send Balances' when finished.
After sending your message, you will get a delivery report summary. At first, all the messages will be in the 'Pending' status but will gradually get updated to either 'Delivered' or 'Failed' based on the delivery confirmation report we get from the mobile network operator e.g Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom etc.
You can then click on 'View Report' to see a detailed delivery report for each parent. Come with us to the next section to understand more about SMS message delivery reports.
Updated on: 04/04/2024
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