Are you a dance studio, or another type of semester or course based business? Tuition ledgers could be the game changing tool you’ve been searching for. You can turn on this free app under Apps & Integrations > App store > Tuitions.
What are Tuition Ledgers?
Tuition ledgers are a billing tool that allow you to group specific courses or semesters together throughout a specific time period. The grouping of these courses or semesters enables you to create discounts based on signups (i.e. number of semesters booked, number of children booked, etc) and allows you to schedule installment dates for payments, so customers do not need to pay a total upfront. Plus, the system will account for cancellations, late signups, or any other changes and automatically adjust the customer’s scheduled payment amounts accordingly.
Especially useful for dance studios where you adjust the pricing based on the number of classes (or hours) someone signs up for in a semester, or the number of children registered together. Tuition ledgers allows for all of these details to be set up and handled on the back end, so you don’t have to keep track of all the nitty gritty details. The tool also allows for simple and easy tracking of all payments (past and future), bookings and registration fees on both your end as well as the customer side.
Want to learn more? Read on for all of the details about how to set up and use your first Tuition ledger today!
Getting Started
To create your first Tuition ledger, navigate to Classes > Tuition ledgers > Add new tuition ledger. From here, you can add in the name and description of your ledger, and you will see the options to add installments and discounts to the ledger.
Adding Installments
Once you’ve created the name and description, you can move on to adding installments. Installments are selected dates that customers will make a payment for the class(es) and child(ren) that they registered for a specific season.
For example, let’s say that you run a kids dance studio and the season runs the same months as the school year (i.e. September through June). Instead of requiring that customers pay the total upfront before September 1st, you might offer monthly installments on the first of each month during that period. Clients can still choose to pay the total amount upfront, yet, the installments allows for more accessibility by offering smaller monthly payments.
The installment amounts are based on the total cost of all of the semester/course class(es) someone signs up for, divided amongst the total number of scheduled payments. Installments will also automatically prorate payment amounts should a student sign up partway through the set semester dates, or if someone cancels one of their classes (all of these calculations will automatically happen on the back end!)
Navigate to: Classes > Tuition ledgers > Add new tuition ledger > Add installment to begin adding installment dates to a ledger.
Adding Discounts
Next up is adding discounts to your Tuition ledger. Within any ledger, you have the ability to assign one or multiple discount(s). Discounts can be based on number of children, number of bookings or average number of hours per week. For example, let’s say that your kids dance studio offers ballet, tap and jazz classes for different age ranges. Students can sign up for one or multiple class types, and parents can sign up one or multiple children. You might want to offer discounts if someone registers for two or more class types, and also offer a discount if a parent registers two or more kids. You can set these up here. Discounts can be set up as a percentage or as a fixed value, and will be taken off of the price that you have set within the semesters or courses themselves.
Note that, the system will automatically update a client’s payment amounts should any cancellations or additions happen after the initial booking. This means that you never have to worry about paying attention to each and every schedule change and doing the math to update payments.
Discounts can be added under Classes > Tuition ledgers > Add new tuition ledger > Add a discount.
Additional Settings
When creating a Tuition ledger, you will also have additional settings to decide on, including:
Only allowing bookings via this tuition ledger, meaning any assigned semester or course associated must be paid using the ledger (aka customers cannot pay upfront or with payment plans).
Setting a total tuition price cap, meaning that if customers signs up for multiple classes or with multiple children there is a maximum amount they would pay.
Assign a registration fee per child, and decide if there is a maximum tuition fee a parent can pay. If you only want a parent to pay the tuition fee once, regardless of the number of children they register, you can set the registration fee and the maximum amount to be the same.
Decide when registration fees should be collected — at checkout or at the time of first installment — as well as a No registration fee charge interval (aka if a customer signs a student up for one class, then decides within X number of days to add a class they wouldn’t be charged again).
Find these settings under Classes > Tuition ledgers > Add new tuition ledger > Additional settings.
Assign Semesters and Courses
Once you have all Installments, Discounts and additional settings competed, you can begin to assign the appropriate semesters and courses to your ledger. These will be all of the different classes that you want connected within this particular ledger (i.e. that are connected within a certain season, or if you have different pricing and discounts for adult classes vs child classes, you could separate them onto different ledgers).
After saving the initial setup of the ledger, click on the Semesters and courses tab to assign the appropriate ones for the tuition ledger you are setting up.
Customer Payment and Registration Details
Once you have customers signed up for semesters and courses within a Tuition ledger, you can go back to the Tuition ledger > Customers to see all the customer payment and registration details, such as the number of children and number of bookings a customer has. If you click into an individual customer within this tab, you can easily see all payments (past and upcoming) under the Installments sub-tab.
If a customer has a failed payment, this will clearly show for you to keep track of, and all succeeded payments are noted as well.
Within the Bookings sub-tab for any customer, you can easily see how much they have paid per booked semester or course. This will also note any discounts that were included with the bookings. The Registration fee sub-tab will show similar data to the installments and bookings.
Tracking Failed Payments
So that you don’t have to go into each individual client’s details within a ledger to track failed payments, there is also a Failed tuition installment payments report available. You can pull this report anytime and use it as a check to ensure all payments are being made.
To find this report, navigate to Analytics > Reports > Failed tuition installment payments.
What Your Customers See
From the customer dashboard, your clients will be able to see all of the details of the tuition ledger(s) they have signed up for. They can easily view all past and future installments, any failed payments, which bookings they have (and pricing), and what registration fees they have paid. Also within this page they can see the amount they have paid against the total amount due.
Note that customers can also sign up, pay for and see the details of tuition ledgers all right within the Momence mobile app!