There are 2 categories of fees that need to be defined:
Recurring Fees & Discounts: those fees that are charged on a regular basis (e.g. weekly infant tuition)
Attendance Based Fees: those fees that are charged as necessary based on a child's attendance
This chapter describes how to define your Recurring Fee and Discount Schedule. The centralized Recurring Fee/Discount Schedule allows you to define, manage, and modify all of the recurring fees and discounts for your school. These fees are the foundation for your billing processes and will be the source for all fee information when you:
assign a fee or discount to a student or family
post a manual transaction
allow for billing to be split between a primary guardian and another 3rd party sponsor
Any changes made to the Recurring Fee/Discount Schedule will be immediately reflected in Fee tab of teh Guardian and Student Folders. If you change or delete a fee in the Recurring Fee Table, these changes will take affect for all students/guardians that use those fees. However, keep in mind, if you have already POSTED charges to a parents account for the period (based on the current fee schedule) those prior posted charges will not reflect the change -- only future charges after the change was made.
To access the Recurring Fee/Discount Schedule, click on Accounting, then Accounts Receivable, then A/R Rules, then Edit Recurring Fee Schedule. Your fee/discount schedule will be displayed.
Fees will be listed in the window in alphabetical order based on the "Fee Definition" shown in the first column.
To add a fee or discount, type in the next available row designated with an '*'. You MUST complete one row before moving on to the next row.
To change a fee or discount, type over the selected Fee Description.
To delete a fee or discount, click in the 'gray area' of the row you want to delete. The row will become 'highlighted'. Now click on the Delete key on your keyboard.
If you accidentally 'blank out' a fee or discount and you can't close this window, click on the ESC key on your keyboard.
Once you are done, you can click on the 'X' in the upper right hand corner of the Fee Schedule window to close this window.
Enter a description of your fee or discount. This description will be displayed in SchoolLeaders dropdown boxes and are for your benefit. The description should be clear, concise, and descriptive to you and your staff. Your customers will not see this text.
The Posting Description is visible to both your staff and your customers throughout SchoolLeader. The posting description is:
printed on your customers' statements and payment receipts.
displayed on your PC screen when you are viewing an account.
printed on many accounting related detail and summary reports.
saved as part of your A/R and A/P subledger details
The Posting Description should be descriptive and understandable for your customers. In the example above, you will see a Posting Description of 'Tuition: %PeriodDate'. The %PeriodDate is an expression that will be substituted with the actual date range that this posting represents. For example:
Tuition: %PeriodDate will be substituted with the open accounting period:
Tuition: 1/1/2002 to 1/31/2002 or Tuition: 1/6/2002 to 1/12/2002
The accounting period dates are obtained from your A/R Fiscal Calendar. SchoolLeader will be tracking which accounting period is currently 'OPEN' and display the dates accordingly. The '%PeriodDate' can be used for any fee/discount description.
The phrase %PeriodDate must be typed correctly, otherwise SchoolLeader will not recognize the phrase. A common error that is made is when the customer types in a 'space' character within the phrase.
Credit Transfers need to occur when there are 2 parties financially responsible for an account, such as charges split between a parent and a government subsidy program, or a divorce situation. This is often referred to as Third Party Billing. The parent is responsible for a portion of the tuition (co-payment), and the third party is also responsible for a portion of the payment. In these cases, you need to set up a Credit Transfer so SchoolLeader can accurately track each charge and payment portion correctly. If you do not need to track 3rd party revenue, then you can ignore this column.
Within SchoolLeader, Credit Transfers can be set up in 2 ways:
Credit Transfers occur when recurring fees are split between 2 parties (e.g. the amount of tuition charged to each party does not change from one accounting period to the next).
Credit Transfers occur based on a student's attendance (e.g. the amount of tuition billed to each party depends on whether or not the child is present that day).
Credit Transfers described in this chapter refer to transferring of charges related to recurring fees. Credit Transfers related to attendance are described in the Attendance Based Fee Schedule.
The Credit Xfer (Credit Transfer) box needs to be checked when part of a charge is to be transferred from one customer's account to another during the Recurring Fees Process.
A complete example on how to define a third party fee is described at the end of this chapter.
As a rule, all Fees defined in this table must be associated with an existing A/R subaccount. The associated subaccount is used to "catagorize your activity in the A/R subledger. Refer to the section on defining your A/R Subsidiary Chart Of Accounts for more information on this subject..
Click on the down arrow in this column, and double click on the appropriate A/R Account to select it.
This column is only used when creating a 3rd Party Subsidy (Credit Xfer) Fee. If this fee is split between two parties, click on the down arrow in this column, and select the 3rd party sponsor associated with this fee (double click on the 3rd party sponsor).
SchoolLeader allows you to maintain up to eight separate and distinct Billing Cycles within your Fee Schedule, so you can group and post fees/discounts that have common recurring schedules. For example, you may bill some charges weekly, some charges monthly, and some charges on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. In this example, you have 3 billing cycles (weekly, monthly, and every 2nd Tuesday).
You need to associate the fees and discounts with the appropriate billing cycle by selecting (double clicking) on the billing cycle number. In the example given, you can associate:
weekly fees/discounts with billing cycle 1
monthly fees/discounts with billing cycle 4
2nd Tuesday of the month fees/discounts with 2
The billing cycle numbers do not have any pre-defined meaning, such as billing cycle 1 always meaning weekly. You may choose any billing cycle number to mean anything for your business, just remember to be consistent when associating these cycle number to the fees. In other words, if you choose billing cycle 1 for weekly fees/discounts, then ensure that all weekly fees/discount are associated with billing cycle 1.
Every fee and discount in the Fee Schedule must be one of two basic types:
Fixed Dollar Fee ($ Fee) or
Percentage Fee (% Fee)
These 2 columns are mutually exclusive of each other and therefore only one column per fee/discount can be populated at a time.
This "$ Fee" column is used when you want to define a fee/discount that has a fixed charge amount. For example:
Pre-K Weekly Tuition $105.00
Weekly Breakfast Charge $5.00
Tuition Discount -$10.00 (you must include the minus sign for the fixed dollar amount to be discounted)
For 3rd Party Fees, you need to populate
the $ Fee column with the amount that the subsidy is paying, preceded
by a negative (-) sign. It is recommended that you populate the $ Fee
column with a -$1.00 (negative dollar). Since
your subsidized families will more than likely have different subsidized
amounts, you can define a default discount amount
(-$1.00) in this recurring fees table. Then you can override this -$1.00
amount with the correct subsidized amount in each individual student's
folder. If
your subsidized children all have the same subsidized dollar amount, then
you can put the correct dollar amount in the $ Fee column (e.g. -$52.00).
This "% Fee" column is used when you want to define a fee/discount that represents a percentage of other fees that will be calculated. For example:
Employee Discount -25.00 (deduct tuition charges by 25%)
Family Discount -10.00 (deduct tuition charges by 10%)
You must include the minus sign for $ Fees and $ Discounts that represent reductions in fees. If you do not include the minus sign, then SchoolLeader will add the dollar amount or discount to the total recurring charge amount. SchoolLeader does NOT allow for percentage discounts for 3rd party subsidies credit transfers (in other words, a 3rd party sponsor credit transfer fee cannot be -10%).
These two columns can be used to limit the active periods for a given fee. This can be useful if you want to predefine and assign new fees for your school but you don't want them to be used until some future date. In this instance you would create the new fees/discounts in the fee schedule with the defined effective dates. These future fees/discounts will not be posted by the Recurring Charge process until the week the fee/discount becomes effective.
If you have an expiration date set on a fee/discount, SchoolLeader will no longer apply that specific fee/discount once the expiration date has passed. Be careful how you use these effective start and end dates.
To set up a Third Party Recurring Fee, follow this example. Go to the first available line in your fee table (represented with an '*'), and begin entering your fee information.
Type in the fee definition representing the subsidized fee. Examples can be 'Subsidized Tuition', 'Dept of Welfare Subsidy', or just plain 'Subsidy'. There should be one subsidy record for each third party sponsor (e.g. if you receive subsidized payments from 3 different organizations, then set up one subsidy record for each organization).
Type in the Posting Description. Examples can be 'Subsidy: %PeriodDate', or 'Subsidized Tuition'.
Check this box by double clicking on the box.
Click on the down arrow in this column and select the appropriate A/R account by double clicking on the account number. Many schools choose to track their subsidized revenue in a separate subaccount such as 'SUBSIDY'. If you want to add this subaccount, you can always go back to your A/R Chart of Accounts and add this SUBSIDY entry.
Click on the down arrow in this column and select the appropriate 3rd party id by double clicking on the 3rd party id. You should have already defined your 3rd party sponsors in Defining 3rd Party Sponsors.
Select the billing cycle for when credit transfers are to occur (double click on the appropriate billing cycle).
Since many students can be subsidized, chances are great that there will be a different fee paid by the subsidy for each child. Instead of creating a separate subsidy record for each possible subsidized fee, create one subsidy record for each agency. Then type in:
-$1.00 (negative one dollar) in the dollar fee column. From within the Student Folder, you will be able to 'override' the -$1.00 with the appropriate amount that is paid by the subsidy.
Ignore this column for third party fees. Third party fees cannot be a percentage for credit transfers.