The family, not the file
Schools bill families, not children. A household holds the children, the parents, the emergency contacts and the grandparents, names the one contact who is billed, and carries a single ledger no matter how many children are enrolled.
Discounts belong here too — a sibling discount, a hardship agreement, a fixed reduction for a member of staff — and they are applied when the charge is raised rather than remembered by whoever raises it. The household's landline lives on the household, because the number on the wall belongs to the house rather than to either parent.
For the office
What a secretary, a bursar or a head of year can do with it.
- Children, parents, grandparents and emergency contacts on one card
- One billing contact, one balance, one statement, however many children
- Discount agreements — sibling, hardship, staff — applied automatically to every charge
- The family's own address and landline, with a per-child exception where a child lives elsewhere
- Documents and the whole conversation history attached to the family
For whoever has to approve it
Where the data sits, who can read it, and what it connects to.
- Households and members are ordinary rows; the ledger is derived, never duplicated
- The parent portal reads through the same policies, so a parent can only ever see their own household
- Foreign keys carry the tenant, so a charge cannot point at another school's family even by mistake
Questions we are asked
- What about children whose parents live apart?
- A child can belong to more than one household, and an address can be recorded against the child as an exception to the family's, with dates.
- How are sibling discounts calculated?
- As an agreement on the household — a percentage or a fixed amount, with a start and end date. Tuition generation applies it when the charge is raised and shows the discount on the charge itself.
See it with your own school's data
Sixty days free, no card up front — or open a ready-made demo school and click around it first.