The week before bills go out
Bills for the spring term are due to go out in early December. The fees module in your MIS will produce them, but only after the bursary team has checked the adjustments: a new sibling discount for a family whose younger child joined in September, two pupils who moved from weekly to full boarding, a bursary reduced after its annual review, a staff child whose parent left in the summer, a pupil leaving at Christmas whose final bill needs to be different.
Each of these lives somewhere different: an email from admissions, a note from the boarding house, the bursary committee minutes, HR. The bursar's assistant builds a spreadsheet of changes and works through it line by line. It takes most of a week, and a couple of errors still get through.
Changes arrive in pieces from across the school
The fee billing itself is not the problem. MIS fee modules generally bill correctly from what they are given. The problem is that the information they need is spread around the school, and nobody passes it on in a consistent way. So the bursary team spends each term collecting changes rather than checking them.
- Boarding changes are agreed by the house and emailed to the bursary.
- Sibling discounts depend on a younger child's start date.
- Bursary and scholarship changes are in committee minutes.
- Staff discounts depend on HR status, which changes.
- Leavers' final bills need notice periods applied correctly under your terms.
What the checking week costs
A week of skilled bursary time each term. Errors that reach parents cause queries and credit notes, and fee bills are exactly where schools most need to be accurate. Late bills mean late payments, which affects cash flow. And the knowledge of how it all fits together sits with one or two people, which is a risk if either is away.
The fee run we build
- Changes that affect fees are recorded at the source through short forms: the boarding house records a boarding change, admissions records a new sibling, the bursary committee's decisions are entered once, HR records staff status.
- Each change carries its effective date and who approved it.
- Before the fee run, every pupil's expected bill is calculated from their record and the changes, using your fee schedule and discount rules.
- The expected bill is compared with last term's, and any bill that differs beyond a reason already recorded is listed as an exception.
- The bursary team reviews the exceptions, not every bill.
- Approved bills are produced and sent through your MIS or finance system, such as the fees modules in iSAMS or WCBS, or your accounts package.
| Change | Recorded by | Effect on the bill |
|---|---|---|
| Boarding status | Boarding house | Boarding fee changed from the effective date |
| New sibling starts | Admissions | Sibling discount applied under your rules |
| Bursary review outcome | Bursary committee | Remission updated |
| Staff status change | HR | Staff discount added or removed |
| Pupil leaving | Registrar | Final bill under your notice terms |
The fee schedule, discount rules and notice terms are the school's own. We make sure every bill reflects them and every change has a source.
Bills that go out on time
In the week before bills go out, the bursary team looks at a short list of exceptions, each with its reason. The rest of the bills are already known to be consistent with last term plus the recorded changes. Bills go out on the planned day, parents' queries fall, and anyone in the bursary can run the process, not only the person who has done it for years.
Signs your fee run needs this
- Fee changes reach the bursary by email from around the school.
- Each term starts with a spreadsheet of adjustments.
- Checking bills takes days before they are sent.
- Errors reach parents and need credit notes.
- Only one or two people understand the whole fee run.