Setting Rates for a New School Year

Once a year, before you generate a single contract, set what each fee costs.

Required Access

Cashier — Supervisor

Everything on the Setup page is built once and left alone. Rates are the part that changes annually: the same fees, the same scales, new amounts.

Go to Cashier, then Menu ▸ Rates.

What you are setting

The page has one tab per active tuition scale, and one grid under whichever you pick.

School fees — one row per grade level, one column per contract fee. The figure in each cell is what a student in that grade, on that scale, is charged for that fee this year. Fees charged during the year do not appear here; they have no annual amount.

The grid is per scale. A school with Standard, Missionary and Child of Employee scales sets three sets of numbers.

Sibling percentages are not set here. A multi-child discount carries its own schedule — what a second child is discounted, a third, and so on — on the discount itself, under Setup ▸ Discounts and scholarships. You set it once, not once a year.

Start from last year

Copy from ▸ Last year brings the whole scale forward — every fee amount — and then you edit what changed. This is the ordinary way to open a new year; typing a grid of figures from nothing invites a transposition nobody will catch until a family disputes their bill.

You can also copy from another scale in the same year, which is useful when a new scale is a variation on an existing one.

Copying replaces, it does not merge

Copying into a scale overwrites every value that scale currently holds for the year. Tuition and Billing asks you to confirm, naming both the source and the destination.

What depends on these numbers

Three things read the rates, which is why they come before contracts rather than after:

• Autoset on a contract fills each student’s fees from their scale and grade. With no rates set, it has nothing to fill in.
• The rate check compares every contract against these figures and flags anything that disagrees. Contracts built before the rates existed all flag at once.
• The Annual Fees report is a school-wide view of what the contracts promise, priced from here.

Changing a rate does not change existing contracts

Rates apply to contracts generated after the change. A contract already built keeps the amounts it was built with, and editing a rate afterwards makes the rate check flag it rather than silently correcting it. That is deliberate — a signed contract is an agreement, not a view of a table.

Order of work for a new year

1. Check the fee catalog and tuition scales are still right. A new fee or a retired scale is a Setup change, not a rates change.
2. Copy from last year into each active scale.
3. Adjust the amounts that have moved.
4. Review the sibling percentages — they change less often, and are easy to forget.
5. Only then generate contracts.

Payment plans need nothing: their dates are stored relative to the school year, so they carry forward on their own.