Setting up fees

Building your fee structure once, so collection is a two-click job all year. 30 minutes with the wizard, or an afternoon by hand.

Fees are built in three layers. Understanding them saves a great deal of rework.

Layer	What it is	Where
Fee types	The names of things you charge for — Tuition, Transport, Exam	Finance & Fees → Fees Setup → Fee Types
Fee groups	A structure: which fee types, how much each, when each is due	Fees Setup → Fee Groups
Assignment	Which students are on which structure	Fees Setup → Assign Fees

Nothing is owed by anybody until the third step. A fee group on its own charges no one.

The fastest way in: Quick Setup

Most schools charge tuition in equal installments. The Quick Setup wizard builds that whole structure from three answers.

You choose	Example
Frequency	Monthly (12), Quarterly (4), Termly (3), Half-Yearly (2) or One-Time Annual
Total amount for the year	24000
Start date	Pre-filled with your academic session's start date

You can also set how many days before each due date the installment becomes visible to parents, and whether a late fine applies.

Preview shows the exact schedule — every installment, its amount and its dates — before anything is created. What you see is what gets saved.

The installments always add up to exactly what you typed

₹24,000 over 7 installments does not divide cleanly. The rounding remainder goes onto the last installment, so the total is never a rupee off.

Put the year in the fee group's name

Call it Tuition 2026-27, not "Tuition".

Fee assignments are not filed by academic year. If you reuse the same fee group next year, every student already on it is silently skipped — you get "Skipped 340 already assigned" and nobody is charged for the new year.

A new group per year is the only structure that works. It also keeps last year's numbers readable.

Building a structure by hand

For anything the wizard does not cover — transport, exam fees, a class-specific structure — use Fee Groups → Add.

For each fee type you add to the group, you set:

Field	What it means
Amount	What that installment costs
Due date	When it must be paid by
Demand date	When the parent first sees it
Fine type	None, a fixed amount, or a percentage
Fine amount	How much, if a fine applies

Demand date is the quiet feature that keeps parents calm

Set demand dates through the year and a parent sees one installment at a time, as it becomes relevant. Leave them all at the start of the year and every parent opens the app in April to a full year's bill. Same money, very different phone calls.

Fines

A fine applies automatically once the due date has passed and the installment is not paid.

Fines are calculated when the item is looked at, not stored as a debt. So a fine figure changes if the rules change, and nothing is "owed" until it is actually collected at the counter.

Discounts

Fees Setup → Fees Discount holds reusable discounts — sibling concession, staff child, merit scholarship.

Field	Notes
Name	What it is
Discount code	Your own short code
Type	Fixed amount, or a percentage
Amount	The value

Discounts defined here are picked from a list when you collect, so the concession is recorded consistently rather than being typed differently by three people.

Assigning fees to students

Fees Setup → Assign Fees

1. Choose the fee group
2. Filter to a class and section, and select the students
3. Assign

You should now see "Fees assigned successfully to N students."

Students who already have that group are skipped and counted separately, so re-running an assignment is safe within a year.

Assign to a class, not to the whole school, when structures differ

Different classes usually pay different amounts. That means one fee group per class band — "Tuition 2026-27 Primary", "Tuition 2026-27 Senior" — each assigned to its own students.

You can also assign a fee group while admitting a student, which saves coming back here for every new admission.

Removing an assignment

Unassigning removes the structure from the student. Do it for a student who was put on the wrong group before any money changed hands.

Do not unassign to "fix" a payment

If a payment has been collected against a fee, unassigning it is not the tool — reverting the payment is. Removing an assignment that has money against it makes the school's books wrong in a way that is tedious to trace back.

The order that works

1. Fee types — the heads you charge for
2. Fee groups — one per class band, per year, with the year in the name
3. Discounts — the concessions you actually give
4. Assign — class by class
5. Then, and only then, collect

Real example

Apex Academy, for 2026-27:

1. Quick Setup, Monthly, ₹24,000, starting 1 April, 7 days lead, ₹50 fixed fine → Tuition 2026-27 Primary, 12 installments
2. Quick Setup again with a different total → Tuition 2026-27 Senior
3. A manual group for Transport 2026-27, four quarterly installments
4. Two discounts: Sibling 10%, Staff Child 50%
5. Assigned class by class — about fifteen minutes

Their mistake in year one: naming the group "Tuition". In April 2027 they re-assigned it and 900 students were skipped. They caught it because the collection total that month was nearly zero.

Common problems

What you see	Cause
"Skipped N already assigned" and nobody is charged	You reused last year's fee group. Create a new one with the year in its name
A parent sees the whole year's fees at once	All demand dates are set to the same early date
A parent cannot see a fee you assigned	Its demand date has not arrived yet
Fines are not appearing	The fee group's fine type is None, or the due date has not passed
The fee group total does not match what you typed	Check each installment amount — a hand-built group does not enforce a total
Students in one class are charged the wrong amount	They were assigned a fee group built for another class band
A new admission has no fees	Fee groups are not automatic. Assign at admission, or from Assign Fees afterwards