Managing Parents School Fees with SchoolWrite (SW)

Parents School Fees Management

Billing and follow-up of due payments

One of the key points to remember when using SW is that it presupposes that it's the parent paying the school fees.  On the SW menu, all Fees dealings are found on the School Fees Menu, under Parents on the main menu.  Each parent on the database has a code that uniquely identifies that parent.  If you choose to connect all learners from the same family to one parent, then the same parent code needs to be put on all those learners from that family.  This implies that all bills for the learners will go to that one parent record and the parent record will receive one fees statement containing all the learners that share that code.  But if you choose to follow due fees by the learners in their classes, then it is best that each learner gets a separate parent code (or record) even if the details of the parents can be the same for all those learners e.g. father, mother, addresses and contacts, residential notes, etc.

On the parent's window, there is a connection to their financial information.  A number of other options may be set up for each parent e.g. Subsidies may be set as a percentage of the total bill, or may be set as a fixed amount to be deducted after billing.  Students with bursaries may be disabled from being billed automatically from here.  And there is an option for charging interest on overdue payments.  All these may be set in this area.

Through the same window, fees statement may be previewed and if desired, printed for the parent (or the learner to take home).  It should be noted that in situations where more than one student share the same parent code, SW will print the name and class of the eldest learner on the fees statement so the deliverer can be easily located.  It will know this from their dates-of-birth.

Fees may be billed at any desired frequency.  Extra charges may be applied to some learners selectively e.g. a student may need an extra uniform, etc.  At the end of the billing process, SW gives you a billing report showing how it has affected each student who has been involved according to the specification of the billing run.  At the end of this report, SW provides a summary of the codes/votes with their totals and how it has affected the General Ledger (note that all postings made in the parents area are automatically reflected in the General Ledger).

The code numbers on the report above are part of your chart-of-accounts which you create yourself, or we help to provide and you continue developing it if you need to.  That report (especially this last page) is very important to keep on file because it gives you the total expectation from each code if all students paid.  The work of the bursar now points more to collecting the dues [remember parents pay any amount any time, not necessarily completing one item at a time].

FEES COLLECTION

There are different ways fees receipts can be captured.  The crude way is to go to the fees menu and enter money received.  That is very common when having one or a few transactions to enter.  A receipt may be printed in a set number of copies depending on the school's requirement.  An A4 paper size receipt may be set, or a short receipt which can fit a maximum of 3 copies on an A4 paper size.

In a similar event, fees payment may be uploaded into SW on a file extracted from a payment processor.  Such file may be downloaded from the bank or other payment solution.  In Uganda a common provider has mostly been School Pay.  We have a 3rd party service where a school registers and be able to download this payment data for any number of days they wish and then upload that information after which SW updates all the necessary students/parent accounts/ledgers.  Even with this service, receipts may optionally be printed.  This way, the bursar does not have to enter each payment after the other.

When following up debtors (fees defaulters as they are usually termed), fees statements are usually printed to those debtors to show parents their payment history detail.  It is usual that schools would first broadcast SMS messages demanding for standing balances before they can send students home.  Optionally, a school can broadcast these demand notes as .pdf attachments on the parents emails if they are available on the database.  These SMS and email broadcasts help a lot in boosting the cash-flow.

Debtors lists may be printed selectively as required.  Because mobile money payments have taken vast strides, many of our users have preferred to print the payment codes on the reports so that parents have more reference points not to lose the codes.

During the course of the year, the statement keeps growing depending on the number of instalments the parent effected the payments.  It is advisable that a detailed transaction report be printed for the whole school and files as a hard copy.  The backup of the system should also be made and stored as usual, then we run a process we call condensing amounts.  In this, all transactions for each parent are summed into one balance forward, and new transactions for the next year begin.  The detail will still be needed and they will be seen from the printouts, or from the backup created before condensing. a separate installation may be done in another place just to keep past data.  Many ways to do it.

Thank you,

Samuel Gitta

+256 772 430202 / +256 752 726835

Systems

SchoolWrite