Parentpay-n in the arse

“Great news, we’ve listened to your thoughts, ideas and suggestions on how we can make our service much more efficient, quicker and convenient to use so stand back and gaze in wonder and amazement at how easy your life will become once we set these new and improved methods into motion.”

It’s an age old story isn’t it , that little paragraph of promise that offers so much , gets our hopes up only to dash  them ruthlessly when it becomes apparent that if anything rather than making life less complicated it has actually made it far more time consuming and difficult than it was in the first place.

Those of you with children at school may have had the misfortune like I, to be acquainted with one such service as this.

It was designed to take the hassle out of having to remember to send your kids into school with money, eradicating the need for them to carry it on their person and so you could keep a closer eye on what they were spending.

I speak of course of the magic of Parentpay, where money is spent by the touch of a screen and topping up their account as long as you had a gadget handy used to be just as easy .

Many a time dinner money and school trips have been paid for in the blink of an eye whilst out and about with just a few clicks on the relevant sections and within a minute or so the funds were good to go.

And we’d been getting along just fine and dandy for the past two years until recently when somebody suddenly decided our lovely content relationship needed a bit of a makeover, rearranged everything and spoilt our easy going flow.

Gone was the straightforward add to basket and checkout method where you could chuck in everything you wanted to pay for, connect to your bank for a direct debit and go.

 Now you have to go through the rigmarole of waiting for your bank to top up your own account with funds before choosing which items you want to pay for one by one and confirming each one singularly whilst you contemplate throwing your phone, tablet or iPad out the nearest window as each page takes aeons to load up on the go slow.

So Parent pay a little suggestion from someone who happens to be that person that your name relates to;

If you’re going to market your new look as amazingly efficient and time saving it’s probably best to make sure that the process doesn’t take almost twice as long as it ever did before.