Challenge

Clipboard was founded in 2017 in Sydney, Australia, by two sports coaches who identified a daunting problem for schools: extracurricular activities required significant administrative work and cost. They started the company to help schools manage activities and developed it into a comprehensive platform with features like timesheet automation, attendance tracking, scheduling, incident tracking, and notifications. Today, Clipboard helps more than 350 schools in Australia and abroad increase participation in extracurricular programs.

Over time, the Clipboard team learned that payments were a key area for disruption. Collecting fees for activities was often time-consuming and error-prone, and reconciliation was burdensome: at many schools, finance teams spent hours each week manually matching payments to student accounts.

Schools with flawed payment systems ended up with more administrative hassles and complaints from parents, plus negatively impacting students who had trouble signing up for and participating in activities. “We realized that payment friction was preventing students from accessing the life lessons and opportunities that extracurricular activities provide,” said Sam Clarke, cofounder and head of sales and marketing at Clipboard.

To better serve its customer base and solidify its competitive advantage, in May 2022, Clipboard set out to solve the payment problem. Its team wanted to find a provider that could facilitate payments between parents and schools while maintaining proper fund flows and compliance with regulatory requirements, such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures and tax reporting. Their goals included removing friction in the payment process that might prevent students from participating in activities and enabling schools to offer more activities by reducing administrative overhead.

Solution

Clipboard chose Stripe Connect in 2022 because it solved the platform’s core payment-related challenges. It enabled schools to receive payments directly from parents while maintaining compliance and transparency, and allowed Clipboard the flexibility to create a user experience that works well for schools’ unique needs.

Schools on Clipboard’s platform that collect activity fees can choose whether to integrate the embedded payment functionality. Those that do go through Stripe’s embedded onboarding for account verification and compliance to ensure they meet regulatory requirements, including compliance with data security laws and card network rules. Connect’s flexibility enabled Clipboard to build custom flows for its Stripe onboarding to handle education-specific requirements like activity setup, fee structures, and integration with existing school systems.

Thanks to Connect’s close integration with Stripe Payments, Clipboard is able to automatically match and verify activity fees to the appropriate school, activity, and student. This simplified process means more students can participate in extracurricular activities without administrative delays, and schools save time on processing and reconciliation that they can devote to other priorities. Schools can also more easily track their activity finances through their Stripe Dashboard, where they can export payment reports that integrate directly with their accounting systems. Thus far, Clipboard has added credit cards and Apple Pay as payment methods, as well as Link, a digital wallet by Stripe that allows users to check out with one click.

Results

Integrated payment solution enhances Clipboard’s value proposition

Clipboard’s sales team has found the integration with Stripe to be an asset in demonstrating the platform’s value to schools. “A seamless payment process is key to the demo,” said Clarke. “We can show schools how removing payment friction truly serves families and leads to greater student participation in activities.”

Schools appreciate that the Stripe integration is optional—they can choose to include payments on Clipboard from the start or add them later if it serves their community.

95% of Clipboard customers that began collecting fees online are still doing so

The feedback from schools using payment processing through Clipboard has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, 95% of schools that have opted to collect activity fees on Clipboard are still using the platform. “Schools consistently tell us that integrated payment processing helps them save time, reduce risk, improve communication with their community, and deliver better outcomes to students,” said Clarke.

Connect’s ease of implementation and compliance management enable Clipboard to concentrate on user experience

The Clipboard team credits Stripe’s documentation with enabling its developers to quickly understand complex payment flows, making the integration with Connect straightforward. “Stripe gave us the freedom to focus heavily on the user-experience layer,” said Clarke. “We’re able to ensure that parents can pay for multiple activities seamlessly, schools can track payments easily, and administrators can reconcile everything automatically.”

Adopting embedded onboarding to hand off regulatory and compliance tasks to Stripe also let Clipboard prioritize education-specific challenges.

Simplified reconciliation and reporting saves time for school administrators

By eliminating manual reconciliation and providing detailed reporting through Stripe, Clipboard has significantly reduced the time schools spend on administrative work. The finance team at Sydney independent school Knox Grammar, for example, now saves days’ worth of work each month with Stripe on Clipboard, which replaced manual fee-collection and reconciliation processes.

“Before Stripe, reconciliation was a nightmare for school business managers,” said Clarke. “Now, we’re saving school finance teams hours of manual work each week.”