Tuition and Billing Overview

Tuition and Billing is where your school determines what each family owes, and records what they pay.

In the main navigation it appears as Cashier, which is also the name of the permission that grants access to it.

Tuition and Billing is a Pro feature

Tuition and Billing is available to schools on the Pro subscription. If your school is on Essentials or Premium, the module will not appear in your navigation. Contact support@mosaicsms.com to discuss upgrading.

The module covers four areas:

• Financial accounts — who owes the school money, and what each of them owes today.
• Payment contracts — the year’s agreed fees for a family, the installment schedule they’ll be billed on, and the signatures on both sides.
• The counter — receiving payments, raising charges, applying credits, and issuing receipts.
• Reports — what was promised, what was billed, what was received, and what remains unpaid.

Tuition and Billing is deliberately not your general ledger. It records what families owe and what they paid; the Accounting module holds the chart of accounts, the journals, and period close. The two are connected — every fee points at an income account — but they are configured and used separately.

Accounting is a separate subscription, and is not required

Pro includes Tuition and Billing, POS and Budget. Accounting is not part of it — it comes with the Pro+Accounting subscription.

It is not required. Without Accounting, Tuition and Billing still works in full: you set your fees, write payment contracts, take payments at the counter and run every report. What changes is where the figures are recorded afterward — rather than posting to a Mosaic general ledger, you export the reports and enter them into the accounting system your school already uses.

Two related modules are documented separately:

• POS runs the school store and cafeteria register. Tuition and Billing can move money between a student’s POS card balance and their financial account, but the register itself is POS.
• Budget tracks spending authority. A fee charged here can increase a budget account’s spending cap.

Financial accounts

Every charge, payment and payment contract belongs to a financial account. Each account has a code, a name, and one or more members — the people it bills for.

• A School Family account usually holds one or more students, and is what a payment contract is written against.
• An Employee account holds a staff member, for fees the school charges its own employees.

A financial account is not the same thing as a household or a family record. It identifies the party the school bills, and may hold as many people as need to be billed together.

It is also not an account in the chart of accounts — that is the accounting sense of the word, and where a fee’s income is recorded. Both senses appear in this module, which is why the longer term is used throughout these guides.

The Financial Accounts list opens on three tabs:

Tab	Shows
Current	Accounts with a member here this year — an enrolled student or a currently employed staff member. This is the default view, and the one most often needed.
All active	Every account not marked inactive, including ones with nobody enrolled this year.
Inactive	Only accounts explicitly marked inactive. At a school with twenty years of history these typically outnumber the active ones several times over.

Who can do what

Cashier access is graduated: each level includes everything below it.

Level	What it adds
None	No access to the module.
View	View accounts, balances, ledgers and contracts, and run every report. Cannot record any transaction.
Cashier	Receive payments, apply credits, and post charges against obligations that already exist. Cannot decide what a family owes.
Contracts	Decide what a family owes — build contracts, set discounts, schedules and installments, and manage account members. Cannot release a contract to the family.
Supervisor	Sign and release contracts to families, delete a contract version, and set this year’s fee and discount amounts.
Admin	Configure the fee catalog, scales, discount types, payment plan templates and school billing settings, and decide who holds the till.

The line that matters most is between Cashier and Contracts: Cashier collects money against what the school has already decided to charge, while Contracts decides what to charge. Staff working at the payment window do not require Contracts.

The line between Contracts and Supervisor is the signature. Building a contract and releasing it to a family are separate acts, because releasing it emails the guardians and cannot be reversed.

Admin applies to every future year, not only the current one — it governs how the module is structured, not the amounts charged in a given year.

Mass Charges is a separate permission

Mass Charges is not a level of Cashier access. It is an independent permission with its own levels, so a teacher, counselor or activity director can bill a field trip to thirty families while holding no Cashier access.

Level	What it allows
None	No access to mass charges.
Contributor	Create and manage your own mass charges. Sees only your charges and those shared with you. Cannot reduce or delete a charge once payments have been applied.
Reviewer	See every mass charge in the school, but edit only your own.
Administrator	Manage anyone’s mass charges, including reducing a charge that already has payments applied.

The built-in Cashier role does not include Mass Charges

Assigning someone the Cashier role grants the Cashier permission but no Mass Charges access, and vice versa. If a cashier also needs to raise mass charges, add it as an individual grant. See Managing User Access.

Related permissions

• Cashier POS Credits — required to put money on a student’s POS card from the account page, or to move money between a card balance and the financial account. Issuing spendable card balance is a different action from receiving a payment, and therefore has its own permission.
• Accounting Admin — needed for the chart of accounts and the system accounts that contracts post against.

What the default roles carry

Role	Cashier	Mass Charges	POS Credits
Cashier	Contracts	—	Edit
Business Manager	Supervisor	Administrator	Edit
School Administrator	Admin	Administrator	Edit

The complete set of permissions granted by each role is in the comparison table on Default Roles.

Prior years may be read-only

Your Year Access permission is separate. If it’s set to View rather than Full, then whenever you switch to a year other than the current or next one, your Cashier access is reduced to View — you can review the year, but not record anything in it. This is the usual explanation when a cashier reports that the action buttons have disappeared.

Setting it up

A new school works through Tuition and Billing in this order. Each step depends on the one before it, and skipping ahead is the most common cause of a contract that will not generate.

1. Build the fee catalog and point each fee at an income account. Nothing else can be configured until fees exist.
2. Define your tuition scales — the groups of students who pay the same rates.
3. Set up discounts and scholarships, and decide which scales each one is available on.
4. Create your payment plans — the sets of installment due dates.
5. Register your cashiers — who holds the till, with which receipt numbers and bank accounts.
6. Set your billing options — late fees, payment reminders, income recognition, contract currency.
7. Review the payment contract text, which is a form letter your school can edit to match its own wording.
8. Set this year’s rates for each scale.
9. Generate contracts, review them, and sign.

Steps 1 through 7 are done once and revisited rarely. Step 8 happens every year. Step 9 happens every year, for every family.

Learn more

Detailed guides for each part of the module:

• Setting Up Tuition and Billing — fees and their income accounts, scales, discounts, plans, cashiers and billing options
• Setting Rates for a New School Year — this year’s amounts, per scale
• Payment Contracts — creating, reviewing and signing one family’s contract
• Working Contracts in Bulk — the school-wide list, the batch generator and bulk signing
• Day-to-Day Operations — receiving payments, raising charges, credits and card deposits
• Mass Charges — one charge, many students
• Reports — which report answers which question