Payment Contracts

A contract is the year’s agreed fees for one financial account, and the schedule it will be billed on.

Required Access

Cashier — Contracts

Signing and releasing a contract to the family, and closing one early, need Supervisor.

This page follows a single account. Doing the same work for a whole school at once is Working Contracts in Bulk.

Open a financial account and go to its Payment Contract tab.

The lifecycle

A contract passes through four states, and the tab shows where it stands as a track across the top.

Stage	What it means
Created	Fees have been entered. There may be no schedule yet.
Installments reconciled	The schedule bills exactly what the fees come to. Until this is true, the contract cannot be signed.
Staff approval	A Supervisor has signed and released it. The family is emailed that it is ready.
Family signature	A guardian has signed it in the family portal.

Alongside that, the contract carries a status: No contract · Draft · In progress · Complete · Exempt · Void.

Building the contract

Create contract opens a four-step wizard. Continue setup resumes an unfinished one where it left off.

Step 1 — Tuition scale

Two decisions, both per student.

Who is on this year’s contract. Every student on the account appears with an Include checkbox, defaulted from their enrollment status. Unchecking someone removes them from the remaining steps, from the totals, and from the printed contract — the right answer for a sibling who has graduated or is not returning. They stay listed here so they can be added back.

Which tuition scale each included student is on. The scale decides their annual rates and which automatic discounts they qualify for, so nothing downstream works without it. You cannot move past this step while an included student has no scale.

Partial-year students are also set here. Turn on the partial-year option and give the student an attendance window; proratable fees are reduced to that share of the year. Setting a percentage does not change any amount by itself — you still run Autoset on the next step to fill the reduced figures in.

A fixed-dollar discount does not shrink with proration

A percentage discount follows a prorated fee down automatically. A fixed dollar amount does not, so a half-year student can end up with a full-year discount against a half-year fee. Tuition and Billing warns you when an account has both — check the amount by hand.

Step 2 — School fees

A grid of students against fees. Enter each student’s standard fee, before any discount.

Autoset fills the whole grid from each student’s scale and grade, using this year’s rates. That is the normal way to fill it; then adjust only the cells where this account genuinely differs.

Step 3 — Discounts

Discounts marked Automatic for a student’s tuition scale are already applied and listed for review. Anything marked Manual is offered for you to add, along with the rest of the catalog.

The adjusted net below the grid is what the contract will actually bill.

Step 4 — Plan and generate

Pick a payment plan and generate the installment charges. What happens to a schedule that already exists is a question in its own right — see Generating and rebuilding the schedule below.

The rate check

Every contract is compared against the school’s standard rates, and the result is shown as a badge you can click to see the detail.

Badge	Meaning
Rates match	Every fee is the standard rate for that student’s scale and grade, and no standard fee has been left off.
Non-standard fees	Some fee has no standard rate at all. Expected for optional services — confirm they apply to this account.
Rate discrepancy	An amount contradicts an established rate, or a standard fee is not charged. Worth opening.
No fees	Nothing has been entered yet, so there is nothing to compare.

A discrepancy is not always a mistake — a negotiated rate is a real thing. Marking the contract Reviewed records that someone looked and the differences are intended, which stops it being flagged.

A review lapses if the contract changes

The review is recorded against the findings as they stood. Edit the contract afterwards and it returns to its real severity, because the thing that was approved is no longer what the contract says.

Generating and rebuilding the schedule

Generating writes the installment charges. Doing it a second time raises a real question — what happens to the installments already there, and to the money paid against them — so it asks, and it describes what will happen to this account rather than naming a mode.

• Keep the settled installments — paid installments and any you entered by hand stay exactly as they are, and the plan bills only what is left over.
• Rebuild the whole schedule — every installment is replaced by a fresh one for the full net. Money already received is re-applied to the new installments, oldest first.

Where only one of these is possible, it is a plain confirmation. Where both are, nothing is preselected — you have to choose.

Nothing is refunded or lost by a rebuild

Every receipt keeps its number, date and amounts. Anything that cannot be re-applied becomes a credit on the account.

Two things ride alongside:

• Late fees carried on the schedule are not part of the contract’s fees, so a rebuild keeps them on their existing due dates. A Supervisor can waive them instead, from the same dialog — unless they have already been paid, in which case it is a refund at the counter, not a waiver.
• Rebuilding a signed contract withdraws it from the family, and it has to be reviewed and signed again.

When it will not reconcile

If the contract does not reconcile, the tab says why in plain terms rather than leaving you to compare totals:

Reason	What to do
No plan selected	Choose a payment plan and apply it, or schedule it by hand.
Not generated	No installments exist yet.
Amounts don’t reconcile	The installments bill more than the net fees. Edit or delete an installment, or rebuild.
Part of the fees aren’t scheduled yet	Some fees have no installment. Apply the plan to the remainder.
Missing tuition scale	A student on the contract has none. Set it in Step 1.
Missing automatic discount	The scale qualifies for a discount that is not on the contract. Review Step 3.
Fees changed — regenerate	The fees or discounts moved after the installments were written.

Last year’s extra fees

A panel lists what this account was charged last year that this year’s contract does not repeat — an extra fee, or one at a different amount.

These deliberately do not carry forward on their own. Measured across a real school, an “other” line repeats for about a fifth of the families that had it, so copying it would be wrong more often than right. The panel puts the question in front of you instead of guessing.

Signing

Review & sign is available once the contract reconciles. It shows the contract as the family will see it, and the signature is your typed name.

Signing does three things at once:

1. Freezes the contract as its own signed PDF, in that account’s language.
2. Sets it to Released — awaiting the family.
3. Emails the guardians that their contract is ready to sign.

Signing cannot be undone

The email goes out immediately. This is why signing is a Supervisor action and building the contract is not.

The family then signs in the family portal, on their Tuition page, and the contract becomes Signed by family.

Editing a signed contract

You can, and Tuition and Billing warns you first. Any change you generate afterwards supersedes the signed version: the old one is kept as history, and the contract goes back to needing a signature. Past versions are listed on the tab, each with its own snapshot PDF.

Closing a contract early

A student leaves, or never finalized an enrollment they were already contracted for. Close contract early asks one question — how much does this account still owe? — and offers four answers.

Basis	What the account is left owing
Keep what they have paid	Exactly what has already been received. The balance closes at zero.
Keep a number of installments	The first n installments as scheduled, whether or not they were paid.
Bill the days they attended	Fees reduced to the share of the year the student was actually here.
Nothing — they never finalized enrollment	Nothing is owed. Everything received becomes a credit.

The preview is the calculation itself, not an illustration of it, so the figures you approve are the figures that get written. It names what is billed now, what is removed, what has been received, and what the account is left owing or holding as a credit.

Two things to know:

• Registration and other non-proratable fees are kept in full. They are earned at enrollment, so an account that never paid one still owes it.
• Nothing is refunded here. Every receipt keeps its number, date and amounts, and anything above what is owed becomes a credit on the account.

Closing removes what is forgiven from the contract and from the schedule, and generating again will not bring it back.