Overview
Finalsite Enrollment Billing is a natural extension of the enrollment and contract process after all of the tuition and fees are set within your site. It's a tight integration between enrollment and the billing process which avoids having to feed all of the data into a third-party system with an additional log-in for parents. This seamless process helps schools stay connected with their families because they have better control over the messaging and the process. It also saves parents time from going into another system as well as the school's time to set up the transfer of its fees into another system.
To get started with Finalsite Enrollment Billing, review the items below to set up and customize your process.
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Click here to review important Billing terminology
Payment Plans and Schedules
You can view all payment plans and their details within Settings--Financial--Payment Plans. You'll need the following items set up for each payment plan:
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Make sure all payment plans have a schedule.
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All payment plans need a payment due date and a percentage amount due.
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Payment plans and schedules must be displayed within the contract.
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Within this page, you’ll see a red triangle if a schedule hasn't been set up for the payment plan.
Resources
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Click here for general information about payment plans and schedules.
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Click here to learn how to set up payment plans and schedules.
Billing Categories
Overview
Within Settings--Financial--Billing Categories, you'll need to review existing billing categories and set up any additional billing categories as needed such as late fees or activity fees. Most billing categories will be applied to the student, except in cases where the parent is solely responsible for the amount, such as late fees.
Billing Category Order
IMPORTANT: The billing categories must be organized in the order that you want payments to be applied, based on the balance due. When an automatic payment is processed, that payment is applied to the balance due in the order of the categories on this page. Let's look at an example:
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Each parent has a ledger with a total amount due. This amount is comprised of tuition, general fees, etc.
Say Parent A has a balance of $1,000, where $800 of that is for tuition and $200 is for additional fees. If the parent makes a payment of $500 and Tuition is the first billing category listed, then that $500 will all go towards the Tuition since it's the first one in the list.
This also means that if they make another payment of $500, then $300 of that will go towards the tuition to finish paying that amount off, and the last $200 will go towards additional fees.
Fee Allocation
Parents can overpay or underpay the amount due, however, they can not allocate what fees their money is applied to. This is dictated by the billing category order and where there's a remaining balance. You can read more about overpayment behavior in this article.
Resources
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Click here to learn how to set up Billing Categories
Payments
To use Finalsite Enrollment Billing, your school must have Payments set up. Please refer to the help articles below on how to get set up with your Deployment Specialist or a member of our Support team.
Resources
Parent Portal Templates: Terms of Service
Within Settings--Portal--Parent Portal Content, there's an 'Autopay Terms And Conditions' template that needs to be customized. Each school is responsible for defining their terms of service, which is a requirement for participation in Autopay/auto-withdrawals.
Email Templates and Automated Communication Plans
Within Settings--Communication--Email Templates, you'll need to customize the automated templates for payments and statements found in the billing tab.
Resources
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Click here to learn about Billing Email Templates.
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Click here to see what emails get sent at various key points in the billing process.
Financial Responsibility
Schools can decide if they want to set up parent/guardian financial responsibility prior to contract generation or later on after contract generation. It only needs to be set up once and these settings will save year over year but can be manually adjusted on a yearly bases.
How are split payments/percentages handled?
The default split is set to 0% until contract submission. The parent that submits the contract and pays the deposit is automatically set as 100% financially responsible. However, if split payments or percentages were defined prior to contract generation or submission, then, financial responsibility will be dictated by these values.
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