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Integrating Meadow Pay with Your SIS

Meadow Pay is a flexible, student-centric payment platform for higher education. It simplifies how students view, manage, and pay their balance, and it integrates directly with your existing Student Information System (SIS).

This guide is a high-level overview of how Meadow Pay integrates with your SIS and what is required to get started.

Purpose

Meadow Pay connects to your SIS to enable two workflows:

  1. Importing student charges. Meadow calculates balances based on charge and credit data from your SIS so students can view and pay their balances through Meadow.
  2. Returning payment data to the SIS. When a student pays through Meadow, the payment is returned to your SIS so your internal systems stay in sync. Meadow generates files in formats tailored to your SIS or delivers payments directly to your API. For file-based integrations, Meadow provides ingestion scripts that run on your side and are customized to your SIS schema. This gives you a reliable, auditable process for synchronizing payments between Meadow and your SIS without manual data entry.

Required Resources

Meadow integrations are designed to be a light lift for IT teams. A file-based integration means setting up a small number of automated data exports from your SIS and deploying a script to ingest payment data back into your system. An API-based integration requires access to select endpoints. Many integrations combine both to suit the SIS configuration.

Exporting Data to Meadow

Meadow requires three data exports, each delivered by secure file transfer or extracted directly through an API integration.

  1. Academic calendar. The academic periods charges belong to, such as Fall, Spring, and Summer terms. Meadow also supports sessions (sub-terms) that divide a term into shorter intervals, such as 8-week sessions or Summer I and II. Meadow uses this data to group and label charges by the correct academic period and to support date-based filtering in the student payment interface. See the academic calendar file specification.
  2. Student information. Profile and contact information for each student. Every student needs a unique institutional ID plus first name, last name, email address, and other contact details. The export also includes indicators that segment populations. See the students file specification.
  3. Charge data. The full set of financial transactions that make up a student's balance. Each charge record includes the associated year, term, and optionally session; the charge amount; and the charge type, code, and description, which support grouping into categories such as tuition, financial aid (anticipated and posted), fees, room and board, and refunds. Because prior term balances may affect the current balance, all of each student's charges should be included, not just the current term's. See the charges file specification.

Prebuilt Templates for File-Based Exports

Our team has extensive experience with every supported SIS and has developed templated SQL queries and integration scripts covering a wide range of configurations and data models. These templates significantly shorten setup and reduce the need for custom development.

API-Based Exports

For SIS platforms that support API-based integrations, such as Ellucian Ethos, Meadow uses established extraction patterns that require no additional customization on your side. Once granted API access by your IT team, our team handles the rest.

Ingesting Payment Data (Postback)

Once a student completes a payment through Meadow, that payment is passed back to your SIS so internal records reflect the updated balance. Meadow supports both file-based and API-based payment integrations.

File-Based Payment Imports

For most SIS platforms, Meadow generates structured payment files (for example CSV) and drops them securely on a client-specific SFTP server. To process these files:

The file-based import pattern is:

API-Based Payment Imports

For SIS platforms that support it, Meadow posts payment data directly through native SIS API calls. This fully automated approach requires no client-side infrastructure for payment ingestion and updates your SIS in real time.

Regardless of the import method, payments are re-ingested into Meadow through your outbound SIS exports to maintain parity.

Supported SIS Platforms

Meadow Pay currently integrates with:

Each integration follows a similar pattern with SIS-specific considerations. See the SIS integration library for the method Meadow uses with each platform.