Tuition Fees and Hourly Rates

This guide will show you how to create and edit tuition fees and hourly rates. Tuition fees are ‘fixed’ amounts added to courses/course types, instrument hire and used in manual charging. Hourly rates are used for school billed courses/course types and are calculated based on the number of booked hours for a school’s provision.

For SpeedAdmin to be able to manage invoicing and charging, the system needs to know how much to charge per term. Information regarding ledger codes, exceptions to the whole term price, and tuition discounts are also defined on the tuition fees.

Before creating your fees, you must create your upper charge categories and charge rates. For help with this, see our ‘Upper Charge Categories and Charge Rates’ guide.

Creating tuition fees (Setting > Tuition fee)

Here you will find a list of existing fees, search options and the possibility to edit existing fees. When you first enter the tuition fee list, you will see ‘Temporary fee’ has already been created. This can be edited or, to create a new fee from scratch, select ‘New tuition fee’:

1. Enter the name of the tuition fee e.g. Individual 20-minute lesson.
2. Enter the fee per school year - this is for internal reference and is the total cost of the fee for the entire academic year. The amount also acts as a safeguard for SpeedAdmin discount models.
3. Enter the fee per lesson – this is used to calculate the price for any students who start late/mid-term or discontinue within a term. The system calculates these prices by the fee per lesson multiplied by the "possible" teaching weeks.
4. Select the relevant charge category for this fee.
   IMPORTANT! Once the data card has been created, the upper charge category can NOT be edited/changed. Please double check this is correct before saving!
5. Specification - when multiple fees are to be converted to the same account in the external finance system finance.
6. Select ‘Create’ to save the new fee.

Once the data card has been created, the tuition fee is listed in the tuition fee list (Settings > Tuition fee). You now need to define the charge rates (when and what to pay) to complete the set-up of the tuition fee.

Adding charge rates to a tuition fee

Your created charge rates are now available in the section below the data card named "Charge rate". You now need to add charge rates and amounts to charge for the fee:

1. Select the Charge rate & Due date - select the appropriate rate (term/month) you want to set up.
2. Enter the last full price date - students who start their lessons/ensembles/hire before this date will be charged full price for the rate automatically. If they have a start date after this date, the system calculates their charges based on the fee per lesson X the number of remaining possible lessons within that charge rate.
3. Enter the free after this date – student who start after this date will not be charged within that charge rate (e.g. last possible teaching date within the term/month).
4. Enter the amount - the amount being charged for the rate (the standard ‘full’ price for the charge rate).
5. Enter the charge text - this text shows will appear on payers’ charges and invoices and can be included in financial reporting.
6. Assign the correct ledger code for the charge.
7. If relevant, select triggers discount – if your service uses multi-course or sibling discounts, marking the checkbox allows those discounts to be applied against this specific tuition fee/charge rate.
8. Sum – once charges are added, this field will sum up the total charges applied to ALL payers charged with this rate in the current academic year.
9. Save the charge rate by selecting "Insert".
10. Now that you have added a charge rate, repeat steps 1-9 for all other charge rates for this tuition fee (e.g., repeat the process for Spring and Summer):
    
    
    

Once you have created the base data card for a new tuition fee, you do not have to manually enter all the information again. Fields such as the payment dates and charge text are often similar on all tuition fees. There are copying options, meaning you only need to amend the amount field, or minor adjustments such as deleting a charge rate if the fee charges in differently.

1. Copy from last school year – when creating a new academic year, you can copy last academic year’s fee data (you may want to still amend the last full price and free after dates)
2. Copy rates and amounts from another charge – once you have created a tuition fee, you can copy over the data from that fee to a new one - remember to amend the price or possibly the charge text:

Creating hourly rates (Settings > Hourly rate)

Hourly rates are used when the charge is based on a booked number of hours, rather than a fixed fee, for school bought provisions (e.g. PPA over, curriculum provision). They can be linked to a lesson, ensemble, or ad-hoc booking, and will be chares to the ‘course school’ of these.

You will need to ask SpeedAdmin Support to active the SCHOOLBILLING feature to use hourly rates. Once this has been activated, select ‘create new hourly rate’ to begin your hourly rate set up:

1. Enter the name of the hourly rate (e.g. Curriculum)
2. Select the relevant upper charge category – as with ‘fixed’ tuition fees, the upper charge category can NOT be changed once the hourly rate has been created, so double check you have selected the correct one!
3. Select ‘Create’ to save the hourly rate:

Once the data card has been created, the hourly rate is listed in both the hourly rate AND tuition fee lists. As with the ‘fixed’ tuition fees, you now need to define the charge rates (when and what to pay) to complete the set-up of the hourly rate:

1. Select the Charge rate & Due date - select the appropriate rate (term/month) you want to set up.
2. Enter the start date – this is the beginning of the billing period e.g. for Autumn term, this is likely to be 1st September.
3. Enter the end date – this is the end of the billing period/after all possible teaching within this charge rate has taken place e.g. for Autumn term, this is likely to be the end of December. When calculating the hourly rate fees for this charge rate, the system will count the number of booked hours between the start and end dates and multiply this by the hourly rate amount.
4. Enter the hourly rate - the amount being charged per hour for the rate.
5. Enter the charge text - this text shows will appear on payers’ charges and invoices and can be included in financial reporting.
6. Assign the correct ledger code for the charge.
7. Sum – once school billed charges have been generated, this field will sum up the total charges applied to ALL payers charged with this rate in the current academic year.
8. Save the charge rate by selecting "Insert".
9. Now that you have added a charge rate, repeat steps 1-8 for all other charge rates for this hourly rate (e.g. repeat for Spring and Summer):

Once you have created the base data card for a new hourly rate, you can then use the ‘copy from last school year’ and ‘copy rates and amounts from another charge rate’ options to save you having to manually re-enter similar information. As with tuition fees, make sure you amend the hourly rate and charge text if these are different from the copied data.

Once created, you can now use these hourly rates to generate school billing charges on school courses/ensembles.

For guides on how to connect the tuition fee to courses or on school billing please read more here: Course & course types or School billing

If you wish to learn more about charging and invoicing, you can find more guides in our Payments/Invoicing section HERE.