Streamline your award disbursements, maximize your impact
Kaleidoscope manages your entire award disbursement process, ensuring seamless fund delivery, timely recipient communications, and comprehensive reporting. Lift the administrative weight off your team’s shoulders, minimize the risk of errors, and create a smooth, hassle-free experience for recipients. With Kaleidoscope on your side, every payment is handled with unparalleled care and accuracy, empowering you to focus on advancing your program’s unique goals with confidence.
Step 1
Award Acceptance
Kaleidoscope builds an Award Acceptance form that is sent directly to your award recipients to gather their information, like student IDs, addresses, banking information if you choose to disburse funds directly to them, and even tax information if the award will not be used for educational purposes. We serve as the recipients’ point of contact and are here to answer questions and guide them through the acceptance process.
Step 2
Collection of Funds
We will create a dedicated account for the disbursement of your organization’s funds, which is updated and reconciled daily, so you get a consistently accurate view of your funds.
Step 3
Disbursement of Funds
Funds are disbursed via ACH or check, ensuring direct delivery to recipients’ bank accounts, 529 plans, or educational institutions. Our team verifies all data submitted through Award Acceptance forms and references a database of over 800 universities with associated ACH information. We can track and confirm both the receipt and use of funds to ensure transparency and accountability.
Step 4
Fund Tracking
Log in to Kaleidoscope at any time to access real-time updates on disbursement activity. The dashboard provides clear visibility into funds disbursed, recipients who have received payments, and confirmation of funds usage. This tracking ensures full transparency, accurate record-keeping, and easy reporting for your team.
FAQs
Scholarship displacement is the practice where universities reduce the financial aid packages of students who receive private scholarships, effectively leading to students paying the same amount out of pocket. Kaleidoscope’s disbursement management service allows you to circumvent this problem by having the option to disburse funds directly to students.
Funds that are used for expenses for required courses, such as tuition, books, etc, are still exempt from tax, while funds that are used for other expenses, such as room and board, travel, optional equipment, etc, may be subject to tax. Our disbursement reporting tools will determine which IRS forms should be provided to your awardees.
Once you send your total program funds to Kaleidoscope to manage your award disbursement process, the funds will be held in a secure, dedicated sub-account within our general ledger that will be updated and reconciled daily to ensure accurate oversight. You and your team will have visibility into this account at all times.
No! We work with programs of all sizes, from a program that has a single $1,000 award winner annually, all the way up to a program that disburses a total of $14m annually to tens of thousands of award winners. No program is too big or too small to take advantage of Kaleidoscope Disbursement Management
Our pricing is variable based on the volume of dollars you disburse annually. Our rates start at 3% of the dollars disbursed annually and go down from there depending on volume.