Upper Charge Categories and Charge Rates

This guide will show you how to create your upper charge categories, describe their use, and how to subsequently create charge rates for each of them.

Creating upper charge categories (Settings > Upper charge category)

All tuition fees and subsequent charges in your system are connected to an upper charge category. These link to your different payer types, charge types and invoicing schedules; for most services, only two categories will be required – parent billing and school billing. If you invoice any specific charge types separately/at different times from your main tuition, ensemble and instrument hire fees, you may wish to create additional upper charge categories (e.g. exams, county groups/residential courses).

When entering the upper charge category section you will see the default SpeedAdmin upper charge category:

You can select ‘Edit’ to change the name, number and account number of the existing upper charge category.

Creating a new upper charge category:

1. Select the free field in the Name column below the existing entry and set the name for the upper charge category.
2. Enter a number for the upper charge category.
3. Enter an account number – this can be the same as any internal service numbers/coding or simply following numerical order.
4. Select “Insert” to save the upper charge category.

Once you have created your upper charge categories, you will be able to create tuition fees, placing each fee into the correct upper charge category. You can find out more about this in our Tuition Fees and Hourly Rates guide.

Creating charge rates (Settings > Charge rate)

Once you have created your upper charge categories, you will need to create charge rates for each of these. Charge rates are your different billing periods for each upper charge category; these will automatically be termly, however you can ask SpeedAdmin to allow monthly billing also.

1. Select the first upper charge category from the dropdown menu:
   
   
   
2. Select the first charge rate to add (Autumn 1 for termly billing, September for monthly billing).
3. Enter the Due date – this is the date the charge rate/billing period is due to start e.g., 1st September. This can be entered manually (DD/MM/YYYY) or selected from the dropdown calendar.
4. Select “Insert” to save the charge rate.
5. Follow steps 2-4 to add the remaining charge rates for the first upper charge category. Then select the next upper charge category and repeat.
   
   
   Once charge rates have been created, you will be able to use the 'copy from last school year' function as part of the set-up of the next academic year. This functions allows you to easily copy data from the previous school year.