Taking Campus Payments Beyond Student Portals with dbs LiveForms™ & TouchNet Marketplace uPay

Universities have done a commendable job digitizing standard student workflows inside core systems like Banner, Workday, PeopleSoft, and Jenzabar. But campus operations don’t stop at the edges of the Student Information System.

Every day, institutions need to collect payments for things that fall entirely outside those closed portals: alumni donations, summer youth camps, community theater tickets, and vendor parking permits. When a payment process doesn’t fit neatly into a student account, administrative staff usually end up dealing with messy workarounds. They patch together disconnected web forms, request IT to enable a payment link, ask non-students to download static PDFs and mail checks, and spend hours manually reconciling receipts against backend systems.

By adding TouchNet Marketplace uPay as a payment gateway directly into dbs LiveForms, we’ve eliminated this friction and achieved TouchNet Ready level. Institutions can now drop secure, compliant payment collection into any eForm, for any user, anywhere across campus—without writing a single line of code.

The LiveForms Edge: Enterprise Security Meets Total Access

TouchNet Marketplace uPay is the gold standard for higher education commerce. What LiveForms does is take that enterprise-grade security and make it available to non-traditional, open-access, and departmental workflows.

  • No Student Login Required: Whether the user is an enrolled student, an alumnus, a community member, or a corporate partner, they can complete forms and submit secure payments without being forced into a closed student portal.
  • Seamless, Compliant Transactions: Using the TouchNet T-Link API, forms execute transactions with full PCI compliance, offering real-time credit card processing, PayPath, and ACH/electronic check options right inside the form flow.
  • Workflows That Keep Flowing: A payment is rarely the end of the process. Once TouchNet validates the transaction, LiveForms automatically routes the document through your required approval chains. It captures legally binding eSignatures (UETA, eSIGN, and eIDAS compliant) and indexes the finalized PDF and confirmation codes directly into your core SIS/ERP. Zero manual data entry.

Moving Beyond Standard Student Requests

Integrating with TouchNet allows every corner of your institution to ditch disjointed payment links:

Campus Sector Use Case Operational Impact
Alumni & Advancement Donor pledges, memorial bricks, gala tickets Collects donor details and payments in one seamless session without requiring a portal login.
Athletics & Community Youth sports camps, facility rentals, equipment fees Wraps liability waivers, medical information, eSignatures, and payments into a single mobile-friendly flow.
Registrar & Academics Official transcripts, drop/add fees, degree audits Automatically routes forms to advisors only after the fee clears, indexing completed records straight to the SIS.
Campus Operations Parking permits, vendor passes, hazmat fees Gives non-university personnel a frictionless way to submit required compliance forms and pay fees on demand.

Why Campus IT Teams Choose dbs LiveForms

Higher Ed IT departments are constantly battling backlogs and resource constraints, and no one wants to take on the burden of custom-coding departmental payment forms.

We built LiveForms to scale without breaking your IT team. Beyond the native TouchNet integration, we offer a Fully Managed Forms Service—our team will actually design, build, deploy, and maintain your forms and workflows for you. Coupled with flexible enterprise hosting (on-premises behind your firewall or in the dbs Cloud) we handle the heavy lifting so your campus can simply operate faster.

Don’t let rigid, closed portals limit how your institution collects fees and donations.

Ready to extend frictionless payment collection across your entire campus? Contact the dbs Software & Services team today to schedule a demo of dbs Liveforms™ today.

dbs Software & Services (dbs) is a long-standing provider of document management and process automation solutions for education and business, and the exclusive provider of Tessi Docubase® in North America.

Tessi Docubase® is an enterprise-grade modular, secure, and easy-to-use document management system that seamlessly integrates with Business Information Systems. Its secure architecture and a broad range of features make it the perfect solution for a wide range of enterprises and use cases.

dbs LiveForms, is a low-code Business Process Automation platform. Its sole focus is simplifying complex processes by automating repetitive steps – from data capture to alerts, notifications, email confirmations, and everything in between quickly, without involving a programmer.

dbs eSign is a cloud-based electronic signature solution that allows users to manage the signing process for a document, from upload to signing and sealing, from any mobile device or computer.

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