Set up and publish your billing policy

Your billing policy is the rulebook for how families are billed: your late fee, your refund window, when an account is suspended for non-payment, and a dozen smaller calls that usually get made one email at a time. You build it in a wizard and publish it as a dated version. Older versions stay on file. This is for school admins, and it's on the web only.

Open it

Open Billing, then Billing settings. On the Overview tab, find Billing policy (SOP) and choose Open policy setup.

If you've never published one, the page reads No billing policy published yet. Choose Start wizard. If you have, Active billing policy shows the current version and its effective date, and Edit policy starts a new draft from it.

Work through the wizard

The wizard has 14 topics in a list on the left and one form on the right: tuition cycle, late fee, NSF and failed payments, refund policy, payment arrangements, discounts, subsidies, autopay, withdrawal, sick and vacation days, account suspension, returned check fee, who gets notified, and how disputes are handled. Finished topics are tagged done and skipped ones skipped.

For each topic:

• Save & continue saves your answers and moves on.
• I don't have a rule skips it. Use it for anything that doesn't apply, like a returned check fee when you don't take checks.
• Back returns to the previous topic.

Money is entered in plain dollars: type 25 for a $25 fee.

To stop and come back, choose Exit (keep draft). An In-progress draft card waits on the policy page, with Resume wizard. Discard draft deletes it and leaves your published policy alone.

Your late fee

Late fee is one of the wizard's topics. There's no separate late-fee screen. The form asks for:

• Type: Flat or Percent. A flat fee is in dollars. Percent (basis points) is in hundredths of a percent, so 500 means 5%.
• Grace days: how long after the due date before the fee applies. It starts at 5, and can be 0 to 60.
• Compounding: how often the fee repeats on an invoice that stays unpaid: None, Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Daily can't be published. With Weekly or Monthly, the fee repeats for each full week or 30 days past your grace days.
• Max cap (blank = no cap): a ceiling on the total fee per overdue invoice.
• Waiver policy: who can waive a fee: School admin, Director only or Director + owner.
• Auto-waive on first occurrence: forgives a family's first late fee.

The NSF topic has its own rule: the ACH failure fee must be $0, because the bank already charges the family. A policy with more won't publish.

Publish

After the last topic, Review & publish shows what you completed and skipped. Set an Effective date, which starts 30 days out so families have notice. Add Notes to parents if you want, like "We're moving to monthly statements next term".

Choose Publish vN and confirm. Clear Day may ask you to Verify it's you. Publishing creates a new version that can't be changed. Families can read the published policy, and ask questions about it, from their autopay page.

History

View history lists every published and archived version, newest first, with its effective date. Choose View to read one in full, including what changed from the version before. To change a policy, start a new draft and publish a new version.