Setting up fees
Fee structure, installment plans and exemptions — the once-a-term setup.
Sidebar → Finance → Fees. You need permission to manage fees — a School Administrator or an Accountant. A Head Teacher and a Proprietor can see fees but not change them.
Fees has four tabs. This article covers the three you set up once a term: Fee Structure, Installments and Exemptions. Taking money is in Recording payments.
Fees is not Billing. Fees is what parents pay your school. Billing — the next item in the sidebar — is your school's own subscription and SMS credits with us. They are unrelated.
Fee Structure
Fees → Fee Structure. Amounts are per term, and each fee type carries a separate rate for each division. So "Tuition" can be one amount for Primary and another for JHS.
Add fee type, name it, and set the amount against each division. The Total row is what a new student in that division will be billed.
The one thing to understand about billing
A student's billed total is written when they are registered, imported or rolled over — and never recalculated afterwards.
Editing the fee structure changes what the next student is billed. It does not go back and re-bill the students already on your roll. This is deliberate: billed totals accumulate across terms, and there is no per-term history to unpick, so silently recomputing would erase last term's arrears.
The practical rule: get the structure right before you enrol, and again before each rollover. If you raise fees mid-term and want existing students re-billed, that is a decision for you to make explicitly, not something the system will do behind you.
Fix billing totals
For when the totals are already wrong — a structure built after students were enrolled, or a fee type deleted leaving residue nobody can clear.
Fees → Fee Structure → Fix billing totals. Choose:
- Scope — the whole school, one division, or one class.
- Target — either zero (clear the residue) or one term at the current structure (write what a fresh student in that division would be billed).
It shows a preview before it writes anything: how many students are in scope, how many will actually change, and the totals before and after.
Students who have paid anything are skipped, always. The tool will not rewrite a total that a receipt already contradicts — those students are listed so you can deal with them by hand.
It is a correction tool, not a recalculate button. Use it to fix a mess, not as part of your termly routine.
Installments
Fees → Installments. A plan splits the term's fees into dated tranches, so the system can tell you who is behind schedule rather than just who has an outstanding balance.
A plan has 1 to 6 tranches. Each needs a label, a percentage, and a due date — and the percentages must add up to exactly 100. The form will not let you save otherwise.
A typical plan:
| Tranche | % | Due |
|---|---|---|
| On reopening | 50 | reopening day |
| Mid-term | 30 | mid-term |
| Before exams | 20 | two weeks before exams |
Set one school-wide default plan, and override it for individual students who have agreed different terms with you. An override replaces the default for that student entirely.
Each tranche then reads as upcoming, on-track or overdue, and each student gets a status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| No plan | No installment plan applies to this student |
| Fully paid | Paid at least the full billed amount |
| On-track | Has paid everything due by today |
| Overdue — X short | Behind by X against the tranches already due |
Without a plan you still see balances; you just do not see who is late.
Exemptions
Fees → Exemptions. Per student — scholarships, sibling discounts, staff children, a government subsidy.
Click a student's row to add or edit theirs. Each exemption has a label and is either:
- a fixed amount, which must be more than zero, or
- a percentage of their billed fees, from 1 to 100.
A student can hold several. Their net billed is the billed total minus everything exempted, and net billed is what the balance, the statement and the parent portal all work from.
⚠️ Exemptions are term-specific and are cleared at rollover. They do not carry into the new term. If a scholarship runs all year, it must be re-entered each term. Check this right after every rollover — it is the easiest way to accidentally bill a scholarship student in full.
Label them meaningfully. "Sibling Discount" tells the next person why the figure is what it is; "Discount" does not.
In what order
- Fee Structure — before you enrol anybody
- Installments — a default plan for the term
- Exemptions — after enrolment, and again after every rollover
Then move to Recording payments.