Managing student meal plans and declining balances

Students have come to expect college life to have built-in structures that make the transition from youth to adulthood easier and more comforting. Likewise, parents want to know that these students have the freedom to purchase textbooks and meals but with guidelines that help them make wise decisions. Colleges and universities have several options to help in this regard, including declining balance management. Watch the video below to see how to manage declining balances for college students and any organization with Bepoz Point of Sale Solutions.

Declining Balance Management

The concept is simple. A college student has an account with a pre-loaded amount of meals or money. The student then uses an ID card with a proximity reader, magnetic stripe or bar code to make purchases. When the student makes a purchase, the amount gets deducted from that account. The account may be automatically reloaded if it is part of a meal plan or could be later be re-loaded by the student as needed if it is a self-funded plan.

Debit Card vs. Declining Balance

A declining balance for college students is not dissimilar to a debit card. The operation is the same, but there are some significant differences for colleges and universities. A debit card is accepted virtually anywhere, whereas a declining balance for college students only applies to on-campus expenses keeping the funds on campus. A debit card might incur fees for the merchant but with Bepoz this is not true, for a declining balance on-campus. A debit card usually allows students to withdraw cash from ATMs. That will not typically be allowed with a college ID card.

Declining Balance Meal Plan

The most popular use for a declining balance is as part of a meal plan. Students can use their ID cards to purchase meals. A declining balance meal plan is sometimes fixed only to be used a specific number of meals per day or week. At other times it can be used as often as the student sees fit up to a specified dollar amount. A meal plan like this is essential because it ensures that students always have access to healthy food. Without it, studies show they rely heavily on fast food, which can contribute to health problems.

The Best System for Managing Declining Balances

Bepoz provides a point-of-sale solution for declining balances. It is flexible enough to be used in multiple locations around campus or pinpointed for use in only one area. Bepoz even works with colleges and universities with multiple campuses because the system is cohesive and updated in real-time.

Are you looking for the best system for managing declining balances? Contact Bepoz today!

Video Transcription

My name is Tim and I’m here with Bepoz enterprise point of systems. And one of the things that we’re commonly asked for is to have our point of sale system manage declining balances for students and colleges and universities, but also declining balances for other purposes and all sorts of different kinds of organizations, hospitals, senior living, just general restaurants and retail, all sorts of different places can use declining balances.

But for the purpose of this video, we’ll be talking mostly about meal plans for colleges and universities. So Bepoz has the capacity to manage those declining balance meal plans for students. So oftentimes, in a college or university, students will be given a certain number of dollars at the beginning of the semester, and they’ll have a declining balance on that. So let’s say they’re given $500 for the semester to spend, or it could be something like $50 for a week or $100 for a month.

So it could be distributed across time or given all at once, but Bepoz will manage all those accounts and all those balances. It is also possible for Bepoz to manage different levels of declining balances. So let’s say you have a student meal plan that includes $500, a student meal plan that includes $750 and another student plan that includes $1000.

Bepoz could manage all those different kinds of plans and know which student is on each plan and know how many dollars they have left until the end of the semester, and then when the end of the semester comes, Bepoz can then zero the balance and reset their balance for the next semester in a holistic global automated fashion.

That’s just a general overview of just a couple of the things that Bepoz can do with declining balances. Of course, there’s many more things that Bepoz could do. If you’d like to talk to us about how Bepoz could help you with your declining balance, meal plans, please call us. We’d love to talk to you. You can call us with the link at the top of the page, or you can click the link below.