NuVision Networks has partnered with two universities – Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pa. and Charleston Southern University in North Charleston, S.C. – to streamline and expedite the schools’ financial aid processes.

Each school used a different method to enabler students to pay for books, and both spent considerable time and resources applying funds to accounts, and checking and double-checking student records, valuable time that could be spent elsewhere.

The business office at Charleston Southern, which had been tasking two employees to spend four hours each day to manually placing charges onto a student’s account in the Jenzabar ERP system every time a student charged books at the school bookstore, has benefitted from NuVision’s Campus Connect integration program. “It has saved the campus real dollars by giving the staff back the time it took to manually post charges to refocus on campus priorities,” says Gene Houghtaling, enterprise architect for Charleston Southern.

NuVision’s Campus Connect integration program enabled Charleston Southern to assimilate their financial aid information with the CampusONE system and Barnes & Noble bookstore. Meanwhile, financial aid is updated overnight in Jenzabar, which then sends the update through the integration program to CampusONE.

The CampusONE system looks for charges and recalculates any alterations to the student’s One Card account. Students can login to the Campus Center online card office at any time to check their balance and see their transaction history.

Cedar Crest College took this program to another level with its own implementation of NuVision’s software. Also using Barnes & Noble as their contracted bookstore operator, the Cedar Crest’s integration with Jenzabar checks every 10 minutes for changes to a student’s financial aid, making updates as needed.

“The staff at Cedar Crest are especially excited that the balances available for the bookstore are being updated almost immediately as changes are made to a students financial aid,” says Julie Hobert, Assistant Director for Information Technology. “The transactions occurring in the bookstore are coming back to the students’ accounts in near real-time allowing them to see accurate account balances on their student portal.”

The integration program at Cedar Crest College also handles refunds and voids, a utility that was added after the initial integration as it was determined to be a necessary process.

NuVision’s solution is providing a new, automated means for students to use their financial aid dollars at the bookstore, whether on-campus or an outside contract, all while keeping that money on campus and within the campus community. As students continue to scour the Internet for the best book prices, it is becoming vital for schools to keep as many book purchases as possible on campus. Making it easy for students to access, and spend, their funds is a step in the right direction for both institution and student alike.