Finalsite Enrollment Billing: Family Experience

Overview 

This article serves as an introduction to how families will encounter billing within Finalsite Enrollment. Its purpose is to provide you with a foundational understanding of billing and family dynamics within your site.

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In this Article

• Parent Accounts
• Parent Account View
• Parent Financial Split
• Parent Shared Access 

Parent Accounts

The most important thing to know about the parent Billing experience is that every parent has their own, unique account.

Why is that important?

It's important because it means that Finalsite Enrollment operates differently from systems employing a single-family account model. This distinction influences how families engage with the platform and how their accounts are structured.

Shared access and financial split both play a role in the parent's billing experience. We'll dig into those a bit further down, but for now, getting started, it's important to know that families are not interacting with a single "family-account". 

Parent Account View

Here's a quick peek at what a parent's billing account looks like on their end. Now, depending on your school's setup, there may be one or two things that look different, but, for the most part, this is what they will see.

Use Impersonate to see what your setup is like

Unfortunately, we can't show every single variable of Billing account setup so we encourage you to use the impersonate feature to take a look at what the billing management tab looks like for your parents. The more familiar you are with what they see, the better you will be at supporting them!

Parent Billing Experience

Check out this video to see how parents experience Billing management in the Parent Portal. (It's based on the parents' experience and is available to parents in their Help Center.)

Parent Financial Split

Let's take a moment to talk about what a Financial Split is and how it affects your parents.

We have a deep dive into this in the Billing: Setting the Financial Split article. If you are getting familiar with this, we highly recommend you save that article and make a note to read it.

What is it?

The financial split percentage determines how much each parent or guardian pays for contract tuition and fees and can be customized for each student.

• By default, all parents/guardians have a 0% split.
• If not set before contract signing, the person paying the deposit is assigned a 100% split.
• The split can be updated anytime.
• Updating the split will adjust the parent ledgers so that future contract charges reflect their assigned percentages.

Here's an illustrated look at how Financial Split affects the parent ledger.

Parent Shared Access 

Shared access allows a parent or billing account holder to grant access to another individual for making one-time payments on an account. 

We deep dive into shared access in our Billing: Shared Access article. That's another good article to bookmark and read later. 

To understand Shared Access and how it affects the parent payment experience, let's take a look at two different examples:

• A parent who is making a payment on their own account.
• A parent who is making a payment for another parent's account (shared access)

A parent making a payment on their own account.

In this quick learn video, you'll see the steps a parent takes to make a payment on their own account.

A parent making a payment for another account.

Need to know

It's important to note that different scenarios with parent setup and history can lead to different experiences when making payments. Let's cover the most common scenarios to help you prepare for those situations and educate parents. 

Scenario 1

This is the most straightforward and most common scenario.

• Parent/Guardian A is assigned a 100% Financial Split.
• Parent/Guardian B has no financial responsibility but is assigned as a Shared Access Contact to Parent A.
• When Parent B logs in, they see Parent A's ledger and can make payments towards it.

Here's what that looks like from Parent B's perspective.

In this scenario, Parent B logs in and sees Parent A's ledger on the Billing Management tab.

They only need to click "Make a Payment" to add a payment to Parent A's ledger.

Scenario 2

• Parent/Guardian A is assigned a 100% Financial Split.
• Parent/Guardian B has no financial responsibility but is assigned as a Shared Access Contact to Parent A BUT Parent B has also had a billing account established in the past.

In this scenario, the parent will see a dropdown that says Select Account since they have access to their own ledger and the other parent's ledger.

Important

Parents need to check that they paying toward the correct ledger.

A good rule of thumb: If the parents see the Select Account dropdown, they need to check that they are viewing the correct ledger before they make a payment.

In the example below, you'll see how the parent can check the Select Account dropdown to make sure that they are on the correct ledger.

You should make parents aware of both scenarios to help ensure that they understand how to correctly make a payment on a shared ledger.

Thank you for being a part of Finalsite Enrollment Billing! We hope this guide has helped you! Please reach out to support if you have any questions and take a look at our other resources, like our video library, to keep learning.

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Additional Resources

• Office Hours & Past Session Recordings
• Parent Billing Workflow
• Parent Portal: Parent Experience