Automatic tuition late fees and payment reminders, with room for exceptions

Two or three families, not a collections department

The setup, in the order the decisions bind

The first two are expensive to reverse. The rest is an afternoon in settings.

1. Write the rule where the family agreed to it. The fee, the grace period and what happens after belong in the enrollment agreement and the tuition schedule you publish before the year opens — not in an email sent in November. In Pearspark the enrollment agreement is versioned and the signature is carried onto the student record, and there is a printable tuition and fees disclosure for the same purpose.
2. Choose flat or percent, and prefer flat. A flat $25 is a number a family can predict. A percent of a $1,400 monthly bill reads as interest, invites the question of whether it compounds, and in some states invites a second question you would rather not answer. Pearspark supports either — a flat amount, or a percent of the unpaid balance.
3. Set the grace period from how money actually moves, not from how annoyed you are. A bank transfer is the slow one: Stripe's own documentation puts ACH direct debit at up to four business days to acknowledge success or failure. A three-day grace period charges families whose money is already on its way. Five to ten days is the range most handbooks settle on, and it costs you nothing.
4. Turn reminders on before you turn the fee on. A school that has never reminded anybody and starts charging fees in September has skipped the step that would have made most of the fees unnecessary. Give it a term.
5. Cap the chasing. Three reminders, spaced about a week apart, then a person picks up the phone. A fourth automated email is not collection, it is noise, and it teaches the family to filter your address.
6. Name who may waive a fee, and require a reason. One or two people, a sentence each time, kept in the record. This is the whole exception mechanism at this size, and it is enough.
7. Decide the standing exceptions in advance: families whose tuition a scholarship or ESA program settles, families mid-way through an aid decision, and any family the head has already made an arrangement with. Two of those three you can hand to the software; the third is a person's job.
8. Switch it on at a term boundary, and never backdate it.

The schedule, and what Pearspark sends today

The middle column is what a small school ought to send. The right-hand column is what our software does, including the places it does nothing.

The three exceptions worth building in before you need them

What the waiver record should hold

Five things, and the last one is the one schools forget.

• Who decided, by name — not "the office".
• Why, in a sentence. It is an internal note, not correspondence: "agreed a later date with Mum on the 3rd" is the record, and the family's email should say what happened, not why.
• When, so the same month's books can be reconciled against it.
• What the family was told, and on what channel. In Pearspark the waiver emails and pushes the family automatically, because they were told when the fee was added and the courtesy runs both ways.
• Whether the family had already paid the fee. If they had, waiving it leaves them in credit and nothing moved, so no receipt and no webhook says so. Pearspark flags that for the office to refund or carry forward; a system that does not will let the balance go quietly negative until a parent asks.

What Pearspark does not do here

In the same spirit as the rest of the page. If one of these is a requirement, buy accordingly.

• No exemption flag on a family. The fee is a school-wide rule with two automatic exceptions — money a state program settles, and a bill still inside its grace period. You cannot mark the Alvarez family exempt in advance; you take the fee off after it lands.
• No waiving in advance, for the same reason: until the fee exists there is nothing to waive.
• No second fee and no compounding. One fee per invoice, ever, however long the bill stays unpaid.
• No maximum-fee setting. A flat fee is capped at the unpaid balance, so a family who owes $3 is never charged $25; a percent is whatever the percent comes to.
• No per-family or per-plan grace period, and no per-campus one — the fee, the amount and the grace period are one setting for the whole school.
• No editing the reminder wording, no more than three of them, no configurable ladder, and no final notice, collections handoff or account suspension step. A school that wants staged dunning letters should look at an enterprise business office suite — FACTS and Blackbaud both sell one — and expect enterprise pricing with it.
• No promise-to-pay or payment-arrangement record. The nearest thing is the family's communication log, where the call gets written down; the invoice itself carries no arrangement.
• No changing a due date once an invoice is raised. Moving a due date means voiding it and raising it again.
• Reminders reach the invoice's billing contact only. A second parent hears nothing unless the bill is split between them, in which case each gets their own invoice and their own reminders.
• A family who has unsubscribed from email gets the push notice only, and the office cannot force an email through — the manual reminder button refuses.
• No reminder before the due date until you switch it on. Every invoice is announced — an enrollment fee and a field trip the same as a month's tuition, within a day of being raised — but the warning a few days ahead of the due date is a separate setting that ships off, and a school charging late fees should turn it on before it does.

The parts of Pearspark this page describes