With our upcoming QuickSchools Webinar on Fee Tracking and Online Payments, we thought we’d highlight one of the key concepts, namely Family Billing, and how it differs from the default Student Billing in QuickSchools. 

Student Billing

By default, all billing is by student. No additional setup is required. Once a student record is created in your QuickSchools, you can immediately start creating Fee Tracking transactions for that student. Transactions will appear under the “Bills” tab of the student record:

If you have Online Payments turned on, parents will see each student listed separately, and parents can pay for each student separately:

Clicking on a student will bring up payment options for that student. This is the same screen students would see when access this feature from the Student Portal:

Family Billing

The primary goal of Family Billing is to control which parent can pay fees for any particular student, and allow that parent to more easily review and pay fees online.

You can turn on the Family Billing feature from the Settings page:

Once Family Billing is enabled, there is an additional step required before you can use this feature completely. And that is to assign at least ONE Primary Payer for each student. You can set this from the student record:

Primary Payers are assigned on a per student basis, not by family. This means that students within the same family can have different Primary Payers. So for example, the father in a family can be the primary payer for one sibling in the family, while the mother can be the primary payer for other siblings.

Once a primary payer has been assigned at least ONE student, they will then appear in the Family Billing screen (under the main Fee Tracking module). Any students that do not have any assigned Primary Payers are mentioned at the top of the screen:

So instead of selecting a student from the list, you would click on a Primary Payer. Clicking on the Primary Payer will bring up the Fee tracking records for all students linked to that Primary Payer:

Most of the functions here are very similar to Student Billing. You can still add charges, payments and invoices. However, when adding a transaction, you will need to specify which student it’s for, especially if the Primary Payer is linked to multiple students:

Finally, if you have Online Payments enabled, parents will no longer see a list of students. Instead, they’ll see all transactions linked to their students. And then can make payments for both students under the same transaction:

If making payments in amounts other than the current balance, the primary payer will need to specify the amount to be paid for each student:

Billing Comparison

So here’s a rough comparison between the 2 modes:

	Student Billing	Family Billing
Turning it On	Enabled by Default	Turn on via Settings
Additional Set-Up	None	Must set Primary Payer for each student
Fee Tracking Listing	Shows All Students	Shows Primary Payers linked to students
Who can pay fees	Student and any linked parent with portal access	ONLY the Primary Payer
Extra Steps when making payments	None	Need to specify student before making payment

At the end of the day, fees are still tracked on a per student basis. Even with Family Billing enabled, transactions are still linked to students. However, with Family Billing enabled, you can control which parents can pay fees for any particular student, by assigning a Primary Payer.