ParentPay Reviews 4,442

Shocking system, can never login and when you do it's a ballache to complete the task I'm in for, went on this morning to pay deposit for a trip for my daughter, it wouldn't allow us to login and when it did all the places were taken, just had argument with school about it, just glad to hear from the school that they are looking into changing them

The website should be more easy to use.

Error showing everytime I try to pay. Contacted customer service who don't have a clue and keep asking me to try a dozen different things to fix, nothing worked! This has been going on weeks! Kept trying to close my report without fixing the problem. Rubbish app, Rubbish and incompetent customer service and diabolical company!

Cannot wait for high school when i wont be forced to use this terrible site. You would think that they would have more robust systems in place when high traffic of users (Monday morning etc) but nope, seem to spend my life waiting for it to load or service is unavailable....

Great service within 24 hrs. Efficient and easy.

Utter garbage. Never works, always down, always working on it. Not fit for purpose. Unfortunately you have to use it when you can I hate it.

This company is absolutely crap. Why on earth? Any school would choose to use this system for payment is beyond me, it never works, often you’re trying to login and the advert placed on the front of the website is far too big for you to see beyond this on the phone finding your payment history and the way it’s displayed is really poor I could continue but frankly it’s not even worth the time I’ve wasted trying to login in the first place, never mind then writing this review

Awful! You can't see what's been paid for, meaning you can easily pay for the same thing multiple times! Not user friendly at all! I wish my kids schools would refrain from using!

Poor system.
Always could not log in and delayed the payment.
How did they entry the school system as a supplier ?

As a user of cypad, I felt I needed to leave a review to warn others. This is not fit for purpose and the company have no interest listening. It is a slow programme and the lack of speed when writing back to SIMs (and over writing SIMs) is a safeguarding issue. The accounting and reports information is a task to understand. Schoolgateway are another company under the parentpay umbrella that also needs improving. I can not understand how this company has got so big!

Terrible system.

Imagine having to pay for your supermarket groceries in advance, by department. Fruit and veg, butchers, specials, household etc. you have to workout in advance what you will spend and allocate your money into separate pots in the supermarket account.

You go to the supermarket, do you shopping and when you get to the till, the cashier says you have over spent in a department. You’ll need to call head office to get a refund and pay the difference or you cannot take your shopping.

Once you sort out what you’ll keep or return, the cashier levies a fee from the farmers who produced the food for serving you.

This is effectively how parent pay works.

It makes a simple task, more difficult. And levies a fee from school budgets for the pleasure. It’s a disgrace, I cannot believe a system like this exists. It makes life harder for schools and parents, while clawing a fee. Mark my words, someone will produce a better fairer system and this business will be bankrupt.

Came on here just to write a review as to how terrible Parent Pay is, in a vague hope that either a) they fix the issue or b) schools see sense and stop using this useless payment system.
If you don’t want to give them your bank account details to take the money direct from your bank account, which I don’t as I only ever use a credit card when paying online then it might work or like me and many others have found, it might not. And when it does stop letting you pay by credit or debit card then you will enter a whole world of pain which basically involves removing browsers cookies, using incognito mode etc etc as advised by their support and then it still not bloody working!!!
I have spent so many hours each month faffing with this website and also explaining to other parents who come into the bank that it’s not their bank card that the issue.
Today I finally got it to work by making separate payments for each item, that’s 6 separate payments!!! 2x dinner money top ups, 2x school trips and 2x bus payment.
Totally ridiculous, I’m sure they have made it as awkward as possible to force people in to giving them their bank details so they can just take the money direct but not everyone wants to do that.
Just sort out the issue Parent Pay!!

Lately, Parentpay seems to have stopped working. My recent experience with Parentpay has been horrible. Have been trying for last couple of days to make a payment but haven't succeeded. Every time one has to login and go through the painful process of adding things to basket and then the payment page would almost always crash on you. I hope they are listening.

Edit: Had been experiencing the above behaviour for quite a few days and had almost reached the last payment date for one of the items. Then, I tried paying one item at a time and it worked, so updating my rating and review.

ParentPay is just a parasite, skimming off a percentage when I could just pay the school directly. That is bad enough, but in 12 years of my being forced to use it, it has never once simply accepted my details and let me sign in. Every single time I have to spend at least an hour resetting passwords, phoning technical support etc. Today I have tried that and still cannot sign in. What an insult to the people they are ripping off.

The idea behind parent pay seems to be solid - make payments for school dinners, trips, text books etc online so your kids don't have to take cash into school. Great.

However - like a lot of online services there is a lack of support when things go wrong. In the event of an overpayment or an issue with a purchase, Parentpay advises you to contact the school - and they even offer to direct messages to the school on your behalf. Unfortunately, the school never seems to get these messages and when I contacted the school by phone they said 'all payment issues have to be taken up with parentpay' - but Parentpay say this isn't how it works and that it's the school's responsibility to sort it out.

So what's the point of the service and what are they being paid for?

Absolutely absurd system and terrible customer service. I have wasted several hours over the past few weeks trying to resolve a payment issue. Endless back and forth, vague and unhelpful replies and a complete insistence that although I have demonstrated with bank statements that I have paid for the two meals my children had before Christmas three times, they are adamant that I have only paid once and still owe them! It’s almost impossible to tie up the payments between their system and my bank as the dates are all different and it’s unclear on their statements what payments are for. I will be speaking to my children’s school and paying for things away from this awful system if possible. I would advise anyone who asked my opinion to do the same!

Absolutely awful, the school sends texts through parent pay and I’ve got all my details correct on the site but I still don’t get text updates so I’m never in the loop when it comes to emergencies.

Very good service

An utterly dreadful website which is made worse by the fact your school tells you its all your fault. The whole system package website is a joke. Totally unfit for purpose and unreliable to use. Schools seem obsessed with it and I have no idea why.