Set up and publish billing policies

Your billing policy is the rulebook for how families are billed. It sets your late fee, your refund window, and when an account gets suspended for non-payment. A dozen smaller calls that usually get made one email at a time get settled here too. Configure it once and the school applies it the same way for every family.

You build a policy in a step-by-step wizard, then publish it as a dated version. Older versions stay on file so you always have an audit trail.

This lives under the school admin billing area at Billing policy (SOP). You need the school admin role to open it.

What a billing policy covers

A policy is one school-wide configuration spread across 14 dimensions. Each one governs a different billing decision:

• Tuition cycle: invoice cadence, due-day offset, statement format, reminder days
• Late fee: flat or percent, grace days, compounding, max cap, waive policy
• NSF / failed payment: NSF fee, retry behavior, suspension threshold, warning cadence
• Refund policy: eligible categories, processing window, approver, annual waiver cap
• Payment arrangement: whether plans are allowed, term length, deposit percent, escalation threshold
• Discount policy: sibling, scholarship, military, employee, and multi-week prepay rules
• Subsidy policy: accepted programs, copay cycle, reconciliation cadence, responsible party
• Autopay policy: opt-in window and self-cancel grace period
• Withdrawal / disenrollment: notice period, deposit refund rules, last-month proration
• Sick / vacation: paid days per year, makeup days, rollover, advance notice
• Account suspension: arrears thresholds and exceptions (subsidy-pending, scholarship-active, arrangement-active)
• Returned check fee: fee for bounced paper checks; relevant only if you accept checks
• Communication preferences: which internal roles get notified for each billing event
• Dispute handling SOP: turnaround SLA, first responder, escalation path

You don't have to fill in all 14. Any dimension you skip stays empty, and the wizard records it as skipped rather than incomplete.

Start a new draft

Open Billing policy (SOP). What you see depends on where your school is:

• No policy yet: a card reads No billing policy published yet. Select Start wizard.
• A policy is already published: an Active billing policy card shows the current version, when it was published, and its effective date. Select Edit policy to start a fresh draft based on that version.

Starting the wizard creates a draft you can edit from scratch. A draft built this way is tagged Wizard as its source.

Work through the wizard

The wizard puts the 14 dimensions in a list down the left and one form on the right. The step list shows where you are: finished dimensions carry a green done tag, skipped ones a grey skipped tag.

For each dimension you have three moves at the bottom of the form:

• Save & continue saves your answers for that dimension and moves to the next one. A green confirmation appears and the step is marked done.
• I don't have a rule skips the dimension. Nothing is saved for it, and the wizard marks it skipped. Use this for anything that doesn't apply, like a returned-check fee when you don't take paper checks.
• Back returns to the previous step.

You can also jump straight to any dimension by selecting it in the left-hand list.

A few fields carry their own rules. The NSF form, for example, requires an ACH failure fee of $0, since the bank already charges the family: a policy with anything above zero won't publish. Daily late-fee compounding won't publish either; use none, weekly, or monthly. Read those before you commit a number.

Money fields are entered in plain dollars. Type 25 for a $25 late fee, not cents.

Save and come back later

Drafts persist. Your in-progress answers are saved as you go, so you can leave and return without losing work.

To step away, select Exit (keep draft). Back on the policy home page you'll see an In-progress draft card showing the source, what it's based on, how many of the 14 sections are complete, and when you last touched it. Select Resume wizard to pick up where you left off.

To throw a draft away, select Discard draft (on the home card or inside the wizard) and confirm. The in-progress answers are deleted and can't be recovered. Your currently published policy is untouched.

Publish

After the last dimension, the wizard reaches the Review & publish step. It lists which dimensions you completed and which you skipped or left empty, so you can confirm before committing.

Set two things:

• Effective date: when the new policy takes over. It defaults to 30 days from today so families get notice of the change. This field is required.
• Notes to parents (optional): a short summary that appears on the parent-facing change summary, for example We're moving to monthly statements starting next term.

Select Publish vN. A confirmation dialog spells out the effective date and reminds you that parents will see a summary of the change. Confirm to commit. Publishing creates a new, immutable version, and the previous version stays available in history.

History and versions

From the policy home page, select View history to open Billing policy history: every published and archived version for your school, newest first. Each row shows:

• Version: v1, v2, and so on
• Status: Published or Archived
• Effective: the date that version took over
• Published at: when it was committed
• Superseded: when a newer version replaced it
• Source: how the version was built: Wizard, Doc extract (pulled from an uploaded handbook), Imported from prior, Hybrid, Platform template, or Manual edit

History is read-only. To change anything you start a new draft from the home page and publish a new version.

Read a published version

Select View on any history row to open that version in detail. The header shows its version, status, source, published and effective dates, any notes to parents, and a change log from the prior version.

Below that, all 14 dimensions appear as expandable panels. Tuition cycle, late fee, and NSF open by default since those get audited most; expand the rest as needed. Each panel lists the exact values that were saved. To compare two versions, open each one from history and read them side by side.

Status lifecycle

A policy moves through three states:

• Draft: in progress in the wizard, not yet in force. Only one draft exists at a time.
• Published: the active version that the school bills against.
• Archived: a former version that a newer one has superseded. It stays readable in history for audit.

Publishing a draft promotes it to Published and archives the version it replaced.

Once your policy is live, the late-fee step you set governs how overdue invoices accrue. Stuck on a dimension? Email [email protected].