The QuickSchools Standard Charges module is actually a very powerful tool for applying discounts and charges based on group of students. For example, you may have a discount for siblings, or a discount for veterans, or a discount for employees. Although the Fees Tracking module may not know automatically if a student is deserving of one of these special discounts, once you include a student into a standard charge, the Fee Tracking module remembers this, so you can re-apply the same discount/charge in the future.

Let’s go through an example:

Creating a Standard Charge

First you’ll need to go to the “Fee Tracking” > “Standard Charges” menu and click on “+ Add Standard Charge”:

Give the standard charge a name, like “Discount for Employees”. Then use the “+ Add Item” to add transactions for this standard charge. Remember that each standard charge can have more than one transaction if required. And you can enter a negative amount for discounts:

One you’ve saved the Standard Charge, it’ll appear in your list of standard charges.

Applying a Standard Charge

When you’re ready to apply the charge, click on the “Apply” button. The following pop-up should appear:

This is where you tell the system which students should be applied the standard charge. You can select specific students, or specific grades levels. Before you click on “Charge Students”, there is an additional option to “Preview & Customize”, which will bring up these options:

Using this menu, you can actually make small changes to transactions for each student being applied a standard charge. By clicking on the “Customize” link next to each student, you can delete a transaction, or create a new charge of your own:

When you’re done, clicking on “OK” will bring you back to the previous screen. You can then go ahead and click on “Charge Students”.

Re-applying a Standard Charge

The important thing to note here is that if you click on “Apply” again, all the students and customizations you had entered previously remains. So you can re-apply the same charges or discounts to the same group of students over and over again as desired. You can of course make changes to the list of students or to the student-customized transactions as necessary, before re-applying the standard charge.

Update Dec 6, 2013

We wanted to re-iterate some scenarios for setting up Standard Charges:

• Charges / Discounts by Family or Primary Payer: Create a Standard Charge and include one student for each family / primary payer
• Charges / Discounts for Siblings: Create a Standard Charge and only include the appropriate siblings for which the charge/discount should be applied. Depending on your discount structure, you may need a separate “First Sibling Discount”, “Second Sibling Discount” and so on.
• Charges / Discounts for Staff / Employees
• Charges / Discounts for Veterans
• Charges / Discounts for specific courses / subjects: Create a Standard Charge for a specific course or subject, and include only those students into the Standard Charge.
• Financial Aid: Create a Standard Charge for the Financial Aid, and include the appropriate students into the standard charge. You can then customize the charge for individual students when the standard charge is applied.
• Scholarships: Similar to Financial Aid, simply create a Standard Charge for the scholarship (you may offer different scholarships with different names), and include the appropriate students into the standard charge.

You can use negative dollar amounts to denote receipt of funds from the school to the student, either for a discount, a scholarship, or financial aid.

Remember that although you have to manually include students into a Standard Charge, once the Standard Charge is created, you can re-apply the charge multiple times to the same group of students. You only need to include the students into the list the first time, because the Standard Charge remembers who’s included in the list for future applications of the charges. You can also customize the charges for each student when applying the charge as well.