The 5 Top Student and Faculty Reimbursement Platforms

Teachers are a vital part of society, yet their underpayment is well-documented. Beyond lackluster pay, 94% of teachers pay out of pocket for supplies and routinely wait up to 60 days to receive reimbursement for classroom-related expenses, exacerbating any financial burdens.

Students aren’t immune to reimbursements either. When students need a reimbursement for student loans or tuition reimbursement programs, they can often wait weeks or months to receive a check.

In both cases, the reimbursement process is broken. Thankfully, some of the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms are reducing payments, ensuring that any out-of-pocket payments don’t hinder a person’s ability to live.

Learn more about the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms and how they can streamline payments.

What To Look for in Student and Faculty Reimbursement Platforms

Despite the need for robust student and faculty reimbursement platforms, few exist solely for this purpose. Instead, you’ll need to research broader expense management and reimbursement platforms to automate workflows, expense reports, invoicing, and more.

However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If anything, you may only use a small portion of the platform’s functions, but with the ability to adapt to additional business needs in the educational realm. Before you choose a platform, look for these features that are common to the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms.

Customization

The best platforms streamline the reimbursement processes through customization. A customizable platform combines expense policy compliance, budgeting, and pre-approval workflows and requirements to ensure that you stay on budget while adhering to the expense policies.

The platform should also allow you to customize your employee expenses and employee reimbursements into categories. By tracking this through the platform, you eliminate the need for messy spreadsheets while also keeping watch on what your employees or students are spending money on.

Integration

Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, is an integral part of any educational institution — be it higher education, middle school, or somewhere in between. A proper student and faculty reimbursement platform should offer numerous integrations with other software at the click of a button.

Payroll, human resource information systems, and accounting software such as QuickBooks should seamlessly link with your expense management software. This should reduce any errors, overspending, or lack of payment due to typos or other hassles associated with manual data entry.

Analytics

Analytics are another crucial part of the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms because they aid in decision-making and business spending. With proper expense data and real-time visibility, you can analyze spending patterns, adjust your expense reimbursement policies, and budget with ease.

User-Friendly

Every reimbursement software solution needs to cater to the individual users. The dashboard should provide a simple, all-in-one method for teachers and students to upload their expenses (paperless is always appreciated) and receive reimbursement. With an end-to-end platform, you have a single spend management solution with little to no chance for errors.

In addition to a user-friendly platform, a mobile app and/or 24/7 customer support can help users no matter when they’re using the platform.

Multiple Payment Methods

When you’re reimbursing a teacher or student, you want to make sure they get their money without hassle. Reimbursement providers with multiple payment methods are always preferred, whether you’re sending an ACH payment, making a direct deposit, sending gift cards, or mailing a check.

The Top Student and Faculty Reimbursement Platforms

If you want to eliminate manual work, automate reimbursement, and get expense tracking all in one place, only the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms will do. Remember that you’re also looking for platforms with the above features, as well as one that fits your unique needs. Get to know a few of these platforms to find the best option.

1. Hoppier

Centered around gift cards, Hoppier is an excellent platform for student and faculty reimbursement programs trusted by more than 1,200 companies. Rather than send direct deposits, administrators can use the Hoppier platform to send gift cards as reimbursement. These digital gift cards feature the Visa logo and act just like a debit/credit card, ensuring that teachers can use them whenever and wherever they want.

Alternatively, Hoppier can function as a spend management platform. Rather than having teachers pay out of pocket for supplies, a Hoppier gift card can give them the spending power they need so they don’t have to dip into their funds. Here’s how it works.

Begin by starting a reimbursement account. Name it “faculty reimbursements” or something similar, then add your school colors and insignia to make it look official. Next, select the gift card amount, the start date, and the expiration date (if applicable). You can also choose where the card can be spent, so all expenditures fall within your policy guidelines.

After you select all of these features, you can send them to each teacher or student by uploading a CSV file of all their email addresses. Add a message if you wish, and send it off to each individual. It’s that easy.

An added bonus is that any money left over on each gift card goes back into your account, giving your administrators or finance team some extra cash for other school programs or the ability to funnel it back into your reimbursement program. Plus, you can track spending on each card to ensure it’s spent at only approved vendors.

2. Rydoo

Founded in 2018, Rydoo is one of the newer entrants into the spend management world, but it still earns honors as one of the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms. Rydoo offers many of the same features as Expensify, but with some additional features thrown into the mix.

With its AI-powered receipt scanning technology, every portion of the receipt is entered into your spreadsheet or database — perfectly organized and ready for review. Once you’ve gathered all your receipts for the week, month, or quarter, you can run them through Rydoo’s Smart Audit software. This AI-powered feature automatically analyzes all expenses to determine which ones are reimbursable and which aren’t.

Rydoo also has a top-rated expense management app that streamlines receipt uploads, approval, and reimbursement — providing a much-needed expensing solution to teachers and students alike.

3. Expensify

Automated record-keeping and expense reimbursement are two of the best features of any of these platforms, and Expensify might do it better than the rest. The key to Expensify’s streamlined reimbursement is its SmartScan technology. Open the app, scan the receipt, and it’s instantly uploaded into Expensify’s system. There’s no need to keep paper receipts, and reimbursement approval comes even faster. Students who qualify for expense reimbursement can also use this same technology to get their money faster.

From the administrative side, users can review uploaded receipts and expenses, approve them, and instantly send compensation in a matter of days.

To reward teachers, Expensify also started the Teachers Unite program. Through this program, teachers receive cash back on 50% of their expenses each year up to $100. It isn’t much, but it’s a quality program that rewards teachers for their constant commitment to education excellence.

4. Concur Expense

Also known as SAP Concur, Concur Expense is another reimbursement platform that refines the expense and reimbursement processes. This cloud-based system functions like many other spend management platforms, allowing users to capture receipts, upload them to the cloud, and automatically populate expense reports. There’s no need for manual data entry that could cause errors, ensuring a smooth, convenient reimbursement process.

A handy feature for faculty and students lies in the approval process. Through the dashboard, users can view their expense reports in real-time, as well as their progress in the approval process. This eliminates the need for follow-ups and provides transparency — two things that your recipients are sure to love.

5. Ramp

Ramp is another top student and faculty reimbursement platform that automates expenses with built-in controls to keep spending in check. According to their studies, using Ramp can save hundreds of hours in the expense and reimbursement processes, allowing students and faculty more time to focus on education.

One of the more attractive features of Ramp is its preset budgets. Through these budgets, teachers and students can see how much they can spend and reimbursement policy guidelines.

Ramp is perfect for teachers and students on the go. The platform accepts receipt uploads via SMS or the app, and also uses integrations with Lyft, Gmail, and other popular apps.

Integration is also a huge bonus of the Ramp platform. Sync Ramp with your ERP software solutions and map thousands of transactions with direct integrations. There’s no need to go back and forth between multiple platforms or apps. Ramp has everything you need in one place — simplifying every step of the process.

Keep Your Faculty and Students Happy and Paid

No one likes to be out-of-pocket for expenses for months on end. Take the initiative and limit these financial pitfalls by using one of the top student and faculty reimbursement platforms. By doing so, you keep your faculty and students happy, increase teacher retention, and improve morale — all in one fell swoop.