How one university cut fee reconciliation from two weeks to one day
February 2026 · 6 min read · by the Belrald team
Westland University's bursary team used to close fees roughly two weeks after each session began. The delay wasn't lack of effort — it was the shape of the process. Students paid through three different channels (bank deposit, online transfer, Paystack). Each channel produced its own report, in its own format, on its own schedule.
The bursary spent the first week consolidating the three reports into a single spreadsheet. The second week was spent reconciling that consolidated spreadsheet against the academic records system — matching payments to students, flagging anomalies, chasing missing details.
After rolling out Belrald, reconciliation now happens within 24 hours of session start. Three things changed.
First, every payment channel now flows into the same place. Paystack, direct bank transfer, and the Belrald-managed payment flow all land in one reconciliation view. The bursary team never opens a separate report.
Second, payment confirmation is tied to the student record in real time. When a student pays, their record updates immediately — no manual matching, no spreadsheet join, no midnight batch job.
Third, anomalies surface at the moment they occur. If a student pays the wrong amount or a reference number doesn't match, the system flags it at payment time. The bursary team investigates two or three flagged cases per day, not three hundred at the end of the week.
The visible outcome: fee reconciliation closed on day two of the session, with clean books. The less visible outcome: the bursary team stopped working weekends during registration.
Rolling out Belrald for the bursary module was a two-week project, most of which was configuring existing payment providers and migrating the current student balances. The operational change was immediate.
Have a similar bottleneck at your institution? We'd love to hear about it. The bursary use-case has become one of our most requested modules — and every institution's workflow is a little different.
