Monthly, quarterly or annual fees: letting families choose without losing track

The Reyes family pays on the first of every month and likes it that way. The Castillos get paid quarterly by their employer and would rather settle a term at a time. One grandmother pays the whole year in September so she never has to think about it again. All three are good customers of the school. All three break a billing system that only knows how to do one thing.

The problem in a Belize school day

Most small schools quietly allow all three arrangements. The trouble is where they are written down: on the family's file, in the bursar's head, or nowhere. When the office runs the monthly fee list, the quarterly families look like they are behind, and someone has to remember to cross them off. When the annual family's September payment is recorded as "September fees", their account looks massively in credit until June. Every month, somebody reconciles by memory.

Then a sibling joins in January, or a family asks to move from monthly to quarterly, and the memory runs out.

How it works in Scholar

Scholar treats the payment schedule as a fact about the family, not a thing the office has to remember.

First, the school sets its prices. Under Settings → Fees, each row is one price: a school year, a class level (or all levels), a Payment schedule and the Amount per invoice. Press Add fee for each schedule you offer. A quarterly price is whatever your school charges per quarter. Scholar never multiplies the monthly price for you, because most schools that offer quarterly or annual payment give a small discount for paying ahead, and inventing that figure would be wrong.

Then, each family gets its schedule. Open the family's statement under Billing → Families and, under Payment schedule, pick Monthly, Quarterly or Annually. It saves as you choose. The whole family shares one schedule, because one invoice covers all their children.

After that, the office does exactly what it did before: on the first of each month, Billing → Generate, confirm the month, press Generate invoices. Monthly families are billed every month. Quarterly families are billed in the month their quarter starts, counted from the start of the school year, so a September year bills them in September, December, March and June. Annual families are billed once, in September. Everyone else is skipped, and the result bar says so plainly: "3 families are not due this month (they pay quarterly or annually)." That line is normal, not an error.

A quarterly invoice reads "Sep–Nov 2026 tuition" on the family's statement and in the parent portal, so a parent paying in October can see that October is already covered. The receipt they print shows the same.

What to expect

A few practical things come up in the first term.

A family joining mid-year on a quarterly schedule is billed from their first quarter; if they join in June, the final quarter is June and July, not three months the school year does not have.

If a family changes schedule, the change applies from the next billing run. Invoices already raised stay exactly as they were, which is what you want: a paid September invoice does not vanish because the family switched to quarterly in October.

The thing most schools forget is the price list. If a family is on a quarterly schedule and the school has set no quarterly price for that child's level, that child is billed nothing, and the Generate result bar says so in bold. Set the price under Settings → Fees and run the month again; it will pick them up without double-billing anyone else.

Payment itself is unchanged: at the office, recorded with Record payment & print receipt, with the balance updating the same second. And the automatic WhatsApp reminders work on the balance, not the schedule, so an annual family that has paid hears nothing until next September.

See it with your own school

Tell us which schedules your families use today and we will set up the price list with you, then run a month so you can see the result bar for yourself. Book a free demo.

Related: Sibling discounts, scholarships and one-off charges without a side spreadsheet and School fee collection: why families pay late and what actually fixes it. Pricing for the school itself is on the pricing section.