Star Accounts will be introducing electronic payments also referred to as BACS in the following weeks with those schools that bank through Barclays. We will initially trial the procedure in several schools before rolling out to all schools that require the facility.
Q. Should my school consider electronic payments?
A. All schools should consider using this facility as it will cut down on the cost of stationery, stamps and time. The current cost per transaction is £0.04 which will be charged to the bank account as a monthly charge.
Once the trial is successful we will update this site with more information on how to enrol. We will also inform schools by MI sheet.
Procedures
Ensure at least one user each for Authoriser and Inputter have been set up for the Barclays.Net online banking facility using this Form. All users were originally set up as read only, therefore most schools will need to re-complete this form to authorise additional rights to the users. If you are unsure which users are setup please speak to you Finance Support Officer whom will be able to provide assistance.
The Headteacher must ensure that both the NCC and Barclays procedures and rules are understood by all registered Inputters and Authorisers and must sign this mandate to signify that all relevant rules and procedures will be followed by all users of the BACS system.
To turn on BACS within Star Accounts. Once we receive the signed mandate from the school we will turn the functionality on within Star Accounts.
Setting up users in star to have access to creating Bacs payments. All users requiring setting up within Star Accounts with ‘creator/inputter’ permissions must have their permissions changed by the schools Star administrator.
Setting up suppliers to be paid by BACS - Refer to Section 4 - "BACS"
Procedure for creating BACS payment file within Star Accounts - Refer to Section 9 - "Bacs Payments"
Trianinng
An E-Learning Course 'Electronic Payments (Bacs)' has been created that will assist with the process and can be accessed through the NCC LearningHub
Security & Financial Procedures
All other existing policies within the school's financial procedure manual still apply such as separation of duties.
As you will now be storing customer/parents bank information you must familiarise yourself with the Data Protection Act (see link above). Some of the basics include, never sharing data, destroying all physical paper records were the data is shown and only holding the data on a secure system i.e. Star Accounts.