Fee Generation Overview
Fee generation references a power set of features in Main Street Sites for posting fees to customer accounts. With these tools you can implement a wide variety of billing approaches -- whichever best suits your needs. In each case, you will set up some conditions for your fees, run the fee generator wizard, then preview the fees to be posted. If you are satisfied with the fees, you'll click the "Post Fees" button to commit them to your customer accounts.
The fees you create will be marked as "generated" fees. Each of these fees will include audit information to explain exactly how the fee amount was calculated. The audit info will include details on how discounts were applied, if any.
The process looks like this:
1) Do any required setup in advance (e.g., add tuitions to classes, enroll students in classes)
2) Each month (or week, etc), run the relevant fee generator
3) Preview the fees created
4) Post the fees! (or generate them again with changes if needed)
Note that fee generation will post fees to customer accounts, but not run payments. Once your fees have been posted you can collect the outstanding amounts in a variety of ways (like Payment Batches, Payment Requests, the Make Payment page, Account Statements, etc.).
Below is a discussion of the different types of fee generation in Main Street Sites.
Periodic Fee Generation
This type of fee generation is most often used for monthly billing. It involves adding a tuition amount to each class, then generating fees based on the students enrolled in those classes. Many options exist for calculating discounts based on number of classes, number of students, etc. Use this type of fee generation when you have mostly uniform amounts to charge your students based on their enrollments in classes.
Please see Periodic Fee Generation for more details.
Schedule-based Fee Generation
Schedule-based Fee Generation lets you define a schedule for your pricing. Schedules supported include hour-based schedules and class-count-based schedules. In either case, you would define your pricing based on a few different tiers (for example -- 1-2 class hours per week for $50, 3-5 class hours per week for $75, etc.). The fee generator would then calculate fees for your enrolled students based on your schedule.
Please see
Schedule-based Fee Generation for more details. Fixed Fee Generation
Fixed fees are used when the fees you are collecting vary on a per-family or per-student basis. In this case you'll enter the fee you'll be collecting on an individual basis for each family. Running the fee generator will create fees for any families that have these amounts defined on their accounts. Sometimes this option will be used in conjunction with the other methods above.
Please see Fixed Fee Generation for more details.
Ad Hoc Fee Generation
Finally, ad hoc fees are fees you are posting for special occasions or one-time events. The most common example of this is would be an annual fee that applies to all enrolled families. For this fee generator, you just specify the amount and a corresponding fee will be generated for the relevant families. Credits can be generated in this way as well.
Please see Ad Hoc Fee Generation for more details.