Tuition management module - Build your fee table

MySchools' dynamic fees can make your invoicing process as efficient as possible. Within a few clicks, your finance team can issue invoices to multiple customers across your school. Using custom fields, you can create fees to adapt to conditions within your pricing. Let's have a look at creating a basic fee and a conditional fee.

Configure your fee table

Open the configuration panel, and select the Fees tab.

Create the Fee name, which will only appear in your internal invoice view. 

The Line item description will be visible on the invoice when raised.

Be mindful of the length as this may distort formatting when generating the invoices, and don't forget to set the fee as active. 

Assigning an account is mandatory, so it is advisable to create your accounts before creating your fees.

The 'in invoice' field determines whether to generate invoices with a 0 amount. 

Bracketing

Your fees are created via brackets. These are :

• By school level

• By class level

• By Subject

• By student

• By family

• By dependent number

Let's look at a few of the commonly used fees;

The following examples will look at a simple school or class-level fee. Selecting either of these options will enable the pricing tab to appear for you to enter the relevant amounts.

Finance admins, please note that once a fee has been used in an invoice, you cannot change the bracketing options. Although the amounts can be adjusted. 

If you choose by subject, the pricing tab will show a drop-down list of active subjects within your system, type to refine your search or choose from the list. Add the subject and assign an amount. Each Student who is actively enrolled in a course attached to the subject will be invoiced.

The two single fee brackets are per student and family; each will show a single default fee field. The amounts will be applied to all students or per family. 

The bracket per dependent number is used to apply a single fee per dependent sibling. It will check the dependent students that the customer has attached their profile, and apply the fee of the child who is in the highest class level.

In the above example, you can select how many dependent brackets you allow for the fee. All subsequent siblings will receive the fee set for the highest class level of enrolment.

In an example here;

If the family has 5 siblings, the eldest child (or highest grade child) is in grade 10, each child included in the billing run will be invoiced at the 5+children price of 600.

If the family has 3 siblings actively enrolled in the school, and the highest grade child is in grade 11, the fee will be 800.

If the family has one child and they are in grade 12, the fee will be 1,500.

The slider 'Should apply within group' is activated, so the system will check the class levels of students who are included in the current batch. So even if the family have 5 children, but only 4 are included, it will use the 4-child rate rather than the 5-child rate.

If the slider is not activated, then it will apply to the student in the highest class.

Conditional pricing

By using student profile custom fields, you are able to create conditional fees. These are commonly used for international students and transport options.

Step 1: You must have a valid custom field on your student profile. Contact our support desk or CSM to add these to your system. This will only apply if the field is an array (drop-down list).

Step 2: Conditional pricing can be applied to any bracket type. Open the pricing tab and add a condition. You will see the fields appear next to the default fee. Enter an amount for each condition. In the example below, we have used a transport fee per student. it is dependent on whether the student has chosen AM, PM or AM/PM options. Respectively, we add a fee to apply depending on the field value. 

Step 3: Select the field. This will list all custom fields found on the student profile. Now add a value, i.e. the reply that will trigger the conditional fee to be applied. For condition #1, your system will check the 'supervised transport' field, and if AM is detected, it will apply the fee of 50Eur. Build these for all the viable conditions that you wish to charge for. Add a description to apply to the published invoice for the line item.

Step 4: Note that the default field is left as 0. If you have selected not to generate invoices with a 0 value on the overview page AND the student does not have one of the conditions in the target custom field, the invoice will not be raised as a value of 0 is detected. This helps if you are selecting a large population. 

Discounts

There are two discounts available, for staff and siblings. The staff discount will check the invoice payer's profiles to see if they are classed as an employee of the school. Siblings will check to see if there are any other dependent students attached to the invoice-paying guardian.

Staff discount

Activate this with the slider, select from your list of accounts and apply a straight % discount if the invoice payer is a staff member of your organisation.

You can change how this is applied to the invoice line item. On the overview tab, there is a slider for merging discounts. This will calculate the discount and apply it to the fee. If deactivated, then the original fee and the discount will be shown as separate line items.

Dependant discount

There are two different discounts that can be applied to sibling accounts. A flat rate or percentage reduction per child. Choose the appropriate method, and the fee tables will appear. 

NB: These discounts are not available for the fee per dependent number, nor the fee per family.

If you wish to apply the discount to the customer even if all dependents are not included in the same billing batch, then leave the slider as is. If you wish to apply the dependent discount only if all dependents are included in the bill run, then activate the slider to make it blue.

Copying fees for rollover

Fees are created yearly; these can change over time, to make it easier for rollover, simply use the copy functionality in your fee table for each fee.