Practice guide

Adding a second campus: what to change so rosters, billing and reporting separate cleanly

Most advice on this question is a list of software settings. The settings are the easy half. The half that decides them is whether the second site is the same school in a new building or a second school wearing your name — and three different authorities get a vote.

Written by the Pearspark team · pricing verified August 2026 · updated September 5, 2026 · about 12 minutes

In short

Add the second site as a campus inside your existing school, not a second account: tag every student, class, teacher and room to a campus, give it its own tuition plans, calendar and attendance policy where those differ, and put campus on the record so reports run per campus and across both. First, though, ask your state, your scholarship program and your accreditor whether this is one school or two.

The decision that is not a software decision

Before you configure anything, answer one question: is the second site the same school in a second building, or a second school? Three authorities answer it separately and they do not have to agree, so ask all three before you promise a family anything.

Your state answers first, and it usually answers in terms of a registration keyed to an address. Florida is the clearest example because the statute spells the record out: the state's private-school database holds the name, address and telephone number of the institution, its enrollment by grade, and the number of days it is in session — one of each — and every existing school must notify the department of any change in the institution's name, address or chief administrator, while each new institution must notify the department of its establishment. There is no field there for a second campus under one record. That does not tell you what to do; it tells you the state is going to ask, and that guessing is the wrong way to answer.

Your funder answers second, and it is usually the strict one. Texas conditions education savings account approval on a school that "has continuously operated a campus for at least two school years preceding the date the school seeks approval" — so whether a site you open this August rides on the operating history of the school that opened it is exactly the sort of question to put to the program in writing before enrollment season, not after a family has counted on the money.

Your accreditor answers third, if you have one, and its answer is usually the most detailed: many treat each site as a separately visited campus with its own head, its own facility report and sometimes its own fee.

Get those three answers, then configure. Schools that configure first tend to re-key a year of records in the spring.

The second site is rarely the same kind of room as the first

Across the microschools surveyed for the National Microschooling Center's 2025 sector analysis, 39% run in commercial or nonprofit space, 29% in a house of worship, 17% inside a private residence and 7% in a private home that is no longer a residence. A school that started in a founder's living room and expands into a church annex has changed occupancy class, fire inspection, insurance and — in some states — the zoning question entirely. Florida gives private schools specific relief here: a school may use property owned or leased by a library, museum, theater or church under that property's existing zoning without rezoning or a special exception, but the facility must still meet applicable state and local health, safety, firesafety and building codes. Zoning relief is not a safety exemption, and the safety half is the half that closes buildings.

The setup, in the order the decisions bind

Steps one and two are expensive to reverse. The rest is an afternoon.

Settle one school or two, with the state, the funder and the accreditor. If any of them says two, you are opening a second school and most of this page becomes a second account rather than a second campus.
Create the campus record before anything else, so roster changes can be tagged as you make them rather than backfilled. In Pearspark this is Settings → Modules & campuses → Add campus: a name, a short badge label that appears beside students and classes, an address and a phone. None of the campus interface exists until a school has two campuses, which is why a one-campus school never sees any of it, and adding one costs nothing — the bill is per student, not per site.
Tag the original site too. The commonest mistake is creating "North Campus" and leaving the founding students untagged, which leaves you with one campus and a pile of unassigned records that show up in every view. Assign the first campus explicitly, the same day.
Assign every roster object, not just students: classes, teachers, rooms and equipment, applicants, calendar events and closures. A class carries its own campus, and attendance, the schedule and the class directory all read the class's — so a student tagged alone is half the job. In Pearspark you assign per record or in bulk through the student importer, whose Campus column matches your campuses by name; there is no bulk-assign screen, so a large existing roster is a re-import rather than a click.
Decide which settings genuinely differ, and change only those. Two sites of one school usually share more than founders expect. The ones that really do vary are the calendar, the bell schedule, the attendance policy, the required immunizations when a campus sits across a state line, and whether admissions are open.
Price the new campus. If tuition differs, build it its own tuition plans rather than editing the shared ones — editing a shared plan re-prices the original site by accident, and that is the mistake that generates refunds.
Scope your staff. Decide who is district and who is site: a head of school who sees everything, a campus lead who works in one site's world by default. Do it before you hire the second site's staff, not after.
Run one report per leg before you open — a roster by campus, receivables, an attendance summary by campus — and check the numbers against what you know. A reporting problem found in August is a filter. Found in May it is a re-key.

Rosters, billing and reporting: what to change, and what Pearspark does

The middle column is what any system ought to do with a second site. The right-hand column is Pearspark today, including the places it does nothing.

What changes	What it should do	In Pearspark today
Students	Each student belongs to one campus, changeable later	Yes; on the student record, set on create, on edit, or from a Campus column in the CSV importer, which matches your campuses by name and reports the ones it could not match
Classes and sections	Sections belong to a campus, not merely their students	Yes; a class carries a campus, and the directory, schedule, attendance and enrollment all inherit it from the class
Teachers and staff	Assigned to a site, with cross-site people held once rather than duplicated	Yes; a teacher has one home campus, or "All campuses" for floating staff. There is no both — a teacher who genuinely splits two sites is a district record
Rooms and equipment	Bookable per site	Yes; resources carry a campus
Applicants and the public form	Applications routed and counted per campus	Yes; the public apply and interest forms show a campus chooser, offer only the campuses actually open, and each campus has its own welcome text and its own open/closed switch
Calendar and closures	Each site's term dates and holidays, with shared ones shared	Yes; an event or closure with no campus applies everywhere, one tagged to a campus applies there — and school days are computed per campus. Families see all-campus events plus their own children's
Bell schedule	A site can run a different school day	Yes; periods and rotation days are per campus, so a campus that joined you running an A/B rotation keeps it while the network runs Mon–Fri
Time zone	A campus across a line reads its own wall clock	Yes; time zone is one of the per-campus settings
Tuition rates	Rates and plans can differ per site	Yes; a tuition plan can belong to a campus, and is then offered only when assigning that campus's students
Invoices	Reconcilable per campus	Partly; the invoice stays family-grouped at school level — see below. Campus money is a derived attribution, not a second ledger
Payment processing	Separate deposit accounts per site, if you need them	No; one Stripe account per school, so both campuses settle into the same bank account
Attendance policy	A site can answer to a different authority	Yes; the tardy rule, the unexcused-only switch and the status families see are per campus, and a report spanning campuses that disagree says so before you download it
Immunizations	Per-site required list	Yes; the required vaccine list and whether records are collected at all are per campus
Messaging	Address one site	Yes; a campus is a message audience for an admin at a multi-campus school
Reports	Filter by campus, and roll up across them	Yes on the roster, attendance, health, aid and scholarship reports: a campus filter, a Campus column in the CSVs, and a district board with one row per campus
Grade scale	Per-site scale if the sites grade differently	No; the scale is school-wide with a per-class override, and there is no campus dimension on it — grading comparability is treated as the point of being one school
Branding and letterhead	Each site's own address on its documents	No; the campus address is stored and shown in settings, and no document prints it. The records packet, family statement, tuition disclosure and scholarship letters all carry the school's address

Campus scoping is a default view, not a wall — ours or anyone's

The standard advice on this question says to make campus part of the permissions model so a campus administrator cannot see the other campus's students. Read that claim closely in whatever you buy, because in most systems — ours included — the campus is an organizational dimension inside one trusted school rather than a security boundary. In Pearspark the school is the wall, enforced on every query; the campus is a default filter plus a write pin. A user limited to a campus works in that campus's world, their writes land there, and a write aimed at another campus's record is refused. But records not yet assigned to any campus stay visible from every campus view on purpose, so a student added on Tuesday morning never vanishes from everyone's list — which means "restricted to North" really reads "North, plus everything nobody has filed yet". It is also not a role: limiting an account to a campus is one setting on the user, independent of what their role lets them do, and there is no campus-director role. If you need two sites that genuinely cannot see each other, you need two accounts, and you should say so to any vendor who tells you otherwise.

Billing is the part the generic advice gets wrong

The usual checklist says to give each campus its own fee schedules and to make sure invoices carry the campus identifier. The first half is right. The second half collides with a family, which is the unit most small schools actually bill.

A family with a child at each campus is one family. Sending it two bills for one household in the same month is a worse experience than the reporting problem it solves, so Pearspark rules the other way: tuition plans can belong to a campus and are then offered only to that campus's students, but the invoice stays family-grouped at school level, siblings across two campuses share it, and one Stripe account sits behind the school. One family, one bill, one payment.

That leaves the real question — how much of the overdue pile belongs to each campus — which we answer as an attribution rather than pretending it is a ledger. An overdue invoice's outstanding balance is split across its tuition lines in proportion to each line's amount, and each share lands on that line's student's campus; a line with no student, or a student with no campus, lands on an Unassigned row. It is done in whole cents with the remainder to the largest line, so the campus column sums exactly to the school-wide overdue figure rather than approximately. The invoice itself is untouched.

Two things to know before you build campus plans. A plan's campus narrows the picker when you assign a student and nothing else: a student who moves campuses carrying a plan that now belongs to the other site keeps billing on it until somebody changes the assignment. That is deliberate — a transfer should not silently re-price a family mid-year — but moving a student and re-pricing a student are two jobs, and the second is yours. And the tuition page itself is school-wide: an account limited to one campus still sees the school's billed, collected and overdue totals and the whole invoice list, because those totals are family money rather than campus money. Only the student pickers narrow.

What can differ campus by campus — the whole list

Sixteen settings, and the list is deliberately short and closed. Everything else is network-wide by construction rather than by backlog: a network whose campuses can each redefine anything is two schools sharing a login.

Admissions: whether applications are open, the welcome text on the application, and whether the interest form is open.
Re-enrollment: the year families are confirming for, and the deadline.
Attendance policy: how many tardies convert to an absence, whether only unexcused tardies count, and which status is released to families.
Health: the required vaccine list, and whether immunization records are collected at all.
The school day: weekly periods or a block rotation, and the rotation's labels.
Time zone, for a campus in a different one.
Behavior locations — the list of places an incident can be logged, which two sites share almost none of.
Volunteering: whether sign-up is open or scheduled, and whether staff see the volunteer roster.
Alongside those, four things are per campus in their own right rather than as overrides: calendar events, closures, bell schedules and tuition plans.
Not overridable, and not by omission: the grade scale, grade levels, academic years and term dates, branding, the modules you have switched on, the school's name and address, and how invoices are grouped.

Reporting: separate operationally, combined analytically

The principle in the usual advice is right — each site runs its own day, the network reads across both — but it is only worth anything if the campus is on the record rather than on the screen. A report you filtered by eye is not a campus report; it is a screenshot.

In Pearspark the campus filter on a report is strict, and the strictness is the point. Day-to-day screens are generous: a campus view shows that campus's records plus anything not yet assigned, so nobody's list has holes in it. Reports do the opposite, because a count you hand to a scholarship program or a board has to mean one thing. A campus's report contains that campus's students and nobody else's, unassigned students appear on their own row, and the two numbers deliberately do not add up to the campus-filtered screen. A report that quietly counted the unassigned twice would be worse than one that made you go and assign them.

The district view is a board with one row per campus: active students, marks on file today and the resulting attendance rate, classes and how many have no sheet yet, applicants not yet enrolled, and that campus's share of the overdue balance. Each column obeys the same permissions as the tiles above it, so somebody who is not allowed the billing question does not get a billing column, and a "View" button drops you into that campus's whole dashboard. The board pack for a governing board is deliberately school-wide, because a board governs the school rather than a site.

Two footnotes you will meet. The enrollment, attendance and staff CSVs carry a Campus column, so anything we do not report on you can pivot yourself. And where your campuses run different attendance or immunization rules, the report says which rule it used before you download it, rather than silently applying one site's policy to another site's numbers.

What Pearspark does not do with a second campus

Ask every vendor for their version of this list. A system with no such list either has not shipped multi-campus or is not telling you about it.

No per-campus branding. A campus has no logo and no colour of its own, and no document prints its address — the records packet, family statement, tuition disclosure and scholarship letters all carry the school's. The campus name on a student ID card is the whole of its presence on paper.
No campus on the invoice, no per-campus Stripe account, no separate deposit account per site. Campus money is an attribution across invoice lines, not a second ledger — and the billing page itself stays school-wide even for an account limited to a campus.
No per-campus grade scale, academic year or term dates. The scale is school-wide with a per-class override; the calendar spine is one school's.
No per-campus module switches. What is turned on is turned on for the network; the question is on the spec and has not been decided.
No history when a student moves between your campuses. The campus is one field on the record — change it and every past attendance mark, grade and invoice line reads the new site, with nothing recording that the student was ever at the other one.
No campus-scoped year-end rollover. Rollover is school-wide and an account limited to a campus cannot run it, so the district person does the June work.
No bulk campus-assignment screen, and no campus wizard. Assignment is per record or through the student importer.
No public page, URL or email identity of a campus's own. One school slug drives the apply and interest links, and the campus is a field inside the form.
Campus is not an isolation boundary. Said twice on this page because it is the claim most worth checking, in our software and in everyone else's.

When two accounts is the right answer

Two campuses inside one school buys a shared roster, one bill per family, staff who exist once, and a district view. You pay for it with a shared identity: one name, one grade scale, one calendar spine, one set of modules, one bank account, and a boundary between sites that is a filter rather than a wall.

If the two sites are run by people who do not report to each other, hold separate money, answer to different states, or would each need their own accreditation anyway, that trade is a bad one. Open a second account. It costs another base subscription, gives clean separation on day one, and the price is that you get no roll-up and maintain two of everything. For two loosely-run sites that is often the right answer, and we would rather say so here than sell you a district feature you will spend a year fighting.

The honest middle case is a school that intends to be a network of five. There the shared model is worth its constraints, and the thing to test before committing is not the campus switcher — it is whether the reports you actually hand to somebody can be produced per campus and across campuses from the same records.

The parts of Pearspark involved

Each page says what the feature does today and what it does not.

Attendance & scheduling Tuition & billing Admissions & enrollment Records, roles & compliance

Watch the setup

Adding the campus, limiting a staff account to it, building a tuition plan, and checking who can see what. A minute or two each.

Video thumbnail: Add a second campus — Add a second campusAdmins

Video thumbnail: Add a staff user and scope their access — Add a staff user and scope their accessAdmins

Video thumbnail: Create a tuition plan and add students — Create a tuition plan and add studentsAdmins

Video thumbnail: Run an access review — who can see what — Run an access review — who can see whatAdmins

Who each system is actually for

Read straight from our comparison pages, so a correction there corrects this. Multi-campus is one of the places where the older, more expensive systems earn their money: if you are opening a fourth site and need per-campus ledgers and separate deposit accounts, look hard at them rather than at us.

NavEd: Microschools, co-ops and hybrid programs that want a gradebook, attendance, transcripts and a parent portal at the lowest published price, and don't need a lending library, equipment booking, volunteer check-in or records escrow.
SchoolCues: Small schools whose hardest job is reaching families — newsletters, yearbooks, alumni, conference scheduling, and texting they never have to count — and who don't mind asking for a quote rather than reading a rate off a page.
QuickSchools: Schools of 40 students and up that want a conventional SIS at the lowest published per-student rate and don't mind that report cards and the parent portal sit one tier up.
Skooly: Enrichment, tutoring and activity-based programs whose job is scheduling, bookings, attendance and billing rather than a permanent academic record — no report cards, no transcripts.
Gradelink: Private schools of 75–400 students that want a mature, widely used SIS.
FACTS SIS (formerly RenWeb): Established private schools of 200+ students with dedicated admin staff, need-assessed financial aid, and enterprise tuition finance.
Blackbaud K-12 Solutions: Established independent schools with a development office, an audited general ledger and enough staff to run an implementation — the size of school Blackbaud has served for forty years.
Sycamore School: Independent schools of 100–400 students that want per-student pricing and integrated payments.
TeacherEase: Schools focused on standards-based grading with a handful of teachers, especially where per-teacher pricing beats per-student.
Alma SIS: Independent and charter schools of 150+ students that want a modern SIS and don't mind quote-based buying.
Google Classroom: Distributing and collecting classwork, especially if your school already lives in Google Workspace.
ThinkWave: Schools on the tightest budgets that mainly need academics: gradebook, report cards, transcripts.
Jupiter Ed: Schools that want a powerful teacher gradebook with LMS features and don't need operations modules.
Transparent Classroom: Montessori programs whose core need is tracking lessons presented and mastered, Montessori-style.
Procare Solutions: Child care centers, preschools and Head Start programs staying early-childhood — ratios, subsidies, meals and daily reports, with no graded class on the way.
CohortLedger: An ESA-funded microschool or learning pod in one of its nine states whose back-office pain is the quarterly disbursement cycle, and whose academic records live somewhere else.
Spreadsheets & the DIY stack: A new school's first semester with fewer than about ten students, before records, billing and parent access all need the same source of truth.

Common questions

We're adding a second campus for our microschool — what system setup changes are needed to separate rosters, billing, and reporting?

Add the second site as a campus inside your existing school rather than a second account, then: tag every student, class, teacher, room and applicant to a campus, including the original site's; give the new campus its own calendar, bell schedule and attendance policy where they genuinely differ; build it its own tuition plans rather than editing the shared ones; decide who is district staff and who is site staff; and make campus part of the record rather than a filter you apply by eye, so reports run per campus and across campuses from the same data. Settle one thing before any of that: whether your state, your scholarship program and your accreditor treat the second site as the same school or a new one.

Should a second campus be a second account or a campus inside our existing school?

A campus inside the existing school if the two sites share leadership, money and identity — that is what buys one bill per family, staff who exist once, and reporting across both. A second account if they are run by different people, hold separate money, answer to different states, or would each need their own accreditation. The second option costs another subscription and gives no roll-up, and for two loosely-connected sites it is frequently the right answer.

Can a campus administrator be stopped from seeing the other campus's students?

In Pearspark an account can be limited to a campus: they work in that campus's world by default, their writes land there, and a write aimed at another campus's record is refused. It is not an isolation wall — records not yet assigned to any campus stay visible from every campus view by design, the billing page stays school-wide, and the school rather than the campus is the enforced boundary. Check this claim in any system you evaluate; "campus-level permissions" usually means the same thing, and if you need two sites that truly cannot see each other, you need two accounts.

Can tuition rates differ between campuses?

Yes. A tuition plan can belong to a campus and is then only offered when you assign students at that campus. Build the new campus its own plans rather than editing shared ones, which would re-price the original site. One caveat: a plan's campus narrows the assignment picker and nothing else, so a student who transfers between your campuses keeps billing on their existing plan until somebody changes the assignment.

Does a family with children at two campuses get one bill or two?

One, in Pearspark. Tuition plans can be per campus, but the invoice stays family-grouped at school level and siblings across campuses share it, with a single Stripe account behind the school. For campus-level money reporting, each overdue invoice's outstanding balance is split across its tuition lines in proportion to their amounts and attributed to each line's student's campus, so the campus figures sum exactly to the school total. If you need genuinely separate ledgers and deposit accounts per site, that is a reason to look at a larger system, or to run two accounts.

How should reports handle two campuses?

Every enrollment, attendance, admissions and billing record should carry the campus relationship so it can be reported on, rather than being filtered visually on screen. Pearspark's report filter is strict: a campus's report contains that campus's students only, unassigned students appear on their own row, and the CSVs carry a Campus column. The district board shows one row per campus — students, attendance rate, classes without a sheet, open applicants, and that campus's share of the past-due balance — with each column obeying the viewer's permissions.

What settings can differ between campuses, and what has to be the same?

Sixteen settings can differ: whether applications and the interest form are open and the application's welcome text, the re-enrollment year and deadline, the tardy-to-absence rule and which attendance status families see, the required vaccine list and whether immunizations are collected, weekly-or-rotation scheduling and the rotation labels, the time zone, behavior locations, and the two volunteer settings. Calendars, closures, bell schedules and tuition plans are per campus in their own right. Everything else is network-wide on purpose — the grade scale, grade levels, academic years and terms, branding, modules, and how invoices are grouped.

Does the state need to know about our second campus?

Almost certainly, and what it wants differs by state. Florida's private-school database holds one name, address and phone per institution, requires notice of any change of address, and requires each new institution to notify the department of its establishment — so the state will treat your second site as one or the other. Scholarship and ESA programs ask separately and are usually stricter: Texas requires that a school have continuously operated a campus for two school years before it can be approved. Ask your state and your funder in writing before you enroll anyone at the new site.

What does Pearspark not do per campus?

No per-campus branding — a campus has no logo of its own and no document prints its address. No campus on the invoice, no separate Stripe or deposit account. No per-campus grade scale, academic year or term dates. No per-campus module switches. No history recorded when a student moves between your campuses. No bulk campus-assignment screen. And an account limited to a campus cannot run the year-end rollover, which stays a school-wide job.

Sources

Vendor pricing is read from each vendor's own published pages and re-verified quarterly; last checked August 2026. Where a vendor doesn't publish a price, this guide says so rather than estimating one.

The full comparison behind each row

Each one is sourced feature by feature, last reviewed August 2026, and says plainly where the other system is the better choice.

Pearspark vs Blackbaud Pearspark vs FACTS Pearspark vs Gradelink All 17 comparisons

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What Pearspark does, in detail

Attendance & scheduling Tuition & billing Admissions & enrollment Records, roles & compliance