Fee Discounts, Sibling Reductions and Staff-Child Waivers

Most schools charge some families less than others. A second child pays reduced tuition, a member of staff's child is waived, a bursary covers part of the term. The Discounts tab of the Finance Workspace is where you define those reductions once, and then award them to the students they apply to. From that point on, every invoice you raise for that student applies the discount automatically. You never have to remember to type a different figure.

Defining a discount

Create a discount with a name, how much it takes off (either a percentage or a fixed amount) and what it applies to. Leave the fee types empty and it reduces the whole invoice; pick one or more (say, Tuition only) and it leaves everything else at full price.

Each discount has a type, and the type is not just a label:

• Sibling applies only to a student who is not the eldest enrolled child of their parent. The eldest pays full fees, which is what makes it a sibling discount. Enrolment order comes from your own records, and a student with no parent linked is treated as the eldest, so a reduction is never given on the strength of missing information.
• Staff child applies to whoever you award it to, with no further conditions.
• Custom does the same, for anything else your school offers. This is the one to use for a one-off reduction for a single student; nothing about it involves siblings.

Awarding it to one student

Open the student's record and choose Discounts, then Award discount. Pick the discount, say how far it reaches (until you revoke it, for a whole session, or for a single term) and optionally record why, which stays on the record for whoever asks later.

Awarding it to several students at once

The same form does a whole group. You can start from either end:

• From the Discounts tab, choose Award to students on a discount and pick who gets it.
• From the Students list, tick the students you want and choose Award discount.

When you are choosing the students yourself, there are three ways to build the list, and they all fill the same one: search for students individually, add a whole class at once, or add all of one parent's children. Everyone on the list gets the same discount, the same scope and the same reason, and you can remove anyone before you confirm.

A batch never fails as a whole. If somebody already holds that discount, they are simply passed over and named in the summary afterwards, along with the reason. The rest of the batch still goes through. Awarding to up to 200 students at a time is supported.

The mobile app does the same: open a discount's menu and choose Award to students, then pick by search or by class.

Checking before you invoice

On the invoice form, Check discounts answers what the invoice will actually charge before anything is created: the fee lines, each reduction that applies, and the reduced total, per child, plus a family total when you are invoicing siblings. It writes nothing.

It is offered for a single student and for a family (by parent), not for a whole class: the reductions differ per child, so the only honest answer for a class would be a list as long as the class itself.

The check is done by the server, not the form, because a sibling discount's eligibility depends on your enrolment records rather than on anything typed into the page. Editing the invoice afterwards clears the answer, because a figure that no longer describes the form is worse than none.

If a discount is granted or revoked in the minutes between checking and creating, the invoice is rejected rather than quietly charging the new figure, and the message names the child whose discounts moved. Check again and create it.

Revoking an award

You can revoke an award at any time. Revoking stops it applying to future invoices and never touches invoices already issued, so last term's figures stay exactly as they were sent.

What families see

A discounted invoice shows the subtotal, each reduction as its own line, and the reduced total. That is true on screen for staff, in the parent portal, on the student's own fees page, in the mobile app, and on the PDF you send. Parents can see what they were given and why the amount differs from the full price.

Each fee also says what came off it. A discount that applies to particular fees is labelled against those fees with the rate it took off, so a parent is not left working that rate out from two figures, or guessing which of five fees the reduction came from. A discount covering the whole invoice has no single fee to sit against, so its rate is shown once, on the reduction itself.

Two things are deliberately left unsaid. A fixed-amount discount shows no rate, because its value is the amount already printed beside it. And where two percentage discounts both apply, both rates are listed rather than added together: the second applies to what the first left, so 20% and 5% come to 24%, not 25%, and printing a single figure would be wrong.

Because a discount is snapshotted onto the invoice at the moment it is raised, renaming or changing a discount later never rewrites what a family was already charged. Retiring a discount stops it being awarded or applied to new invoices, and leaves every historical record intact.

Discounts are permission-controlled in their own right: seeing them and managing them are separate grants from the rest of fee management, so an accountant can run discounts without every finance role being able to.