Recording payments and chasing arrears

Sidebar → Finance → Fees → Payments. This is the tab Fees opens on, and the one you will live in.

Set your fee structure up first, or balances will not mean anything — see Setting up fees.

The four figures at the top

Outstanding is against net billed, so an exempted student is not counted as owing money they were never going to pay.

Recording a payment

Record Payment, top right. Four things:

1. Student — search by name or ID
2. Fee type — from your fee structure
3. Amount
4. Method — Mobile Money, Bank Transfer or Cash

As you type the amount, the dialog tells you what the balance will be afterwards. Save, and a receipt number is issued automatically — you never type one, and two people recording payments at the same moment cannot end up with the same number.

Paying more than is owed

If the amount is more than the outstanding balance, you are asked to confirm before anything is saved. Confirm only if it really is an advance credit; otherwise go back and check the figure.

This is a guard against a mistyped amount, which is by far the most common way a day's takings stop reconciling. A student with no balance at all is recorded as credit without the extra prompt.

If Record Payment is greyed out

Your school's own subscription is overdue, so the system is in a restricted state. See Sidebar → Finance → Billing, or contact your operator. Reading records still works; adding new ones does not.

Receipts and statements

Open any payment to Print receipt.

Statement gives the full picture for one student — everything billed, everything paid, every receipt, and the balance. Print it, or download it. It is the same record a parent sees in their own portal, so if a parent queries a figure, you are both looking at the same thing.

Export on the toolbar takes the payment records out to Excel for your own books.

Finding who owes what

The student list carries each student's status. Sort or filter by it to get your list for the day — the students who are Overdue are the ones behind against their installment plan, not merely the ones with a balance. Without a plan you get balances but no sense of who is late; see Installments.

Automatic arrears reminders

Sidebar → Communication → Messaging → Automation. Switch arrears reminders on and choose a cadence — every 7, 14 or 30 days.

A daily job then sends reminders to guardians who are behind. The card shows you when it last ran and when the next one is due, so you can tell the difference between "nothing was sent" and "nothing needed sending".

Reminders go to the guardian email address on the student's record. A student with no guardian email cannot be reminded — worth checking before you conclude the reminders are not working.

Messaging is enabled per school. If you cannot see it in the sidebar, or it says it is unavailable, that is a school-level setting rather than your permissions — contact your operator.

When a figure looks wrong

Work through it in this order:

1. Are exemptions right for this term? They are cleared at every rollover, so a scholarship student may be billed in full.
2. Was the student billed under the old structure? Billed totals are written at registration and not recalculated, so a student enrolled before you changed the fees keeps the old amount.
3. Is there an advance credit? An earlier overpayment reduces what appears outstanding now.
4. Is the structure itself right? Check the Total row per division.

If the totals are wrong across many students rather than one, that is what Fix billing totals is for — read the section on it in Setting up fees before running it.