This guide will show you how SpeedAdmin can automatically calculate and add reimbursements, based on the number of cancelled lessons that have not been made up over the year.
IMPORTANT! - The reimbursement function is designed to be used at the end of the academic year once all tuition has finished, allowing your teachers sufficient time to deliver any re-scheduled lessons. If you wish to run termly reimbursements, there are additional steps shown at the end of this guide which you will need to include in your termly processes.
Cancellation causes (Settings > Cancellation cause)
To use the reimbursement function, you will first need to set up and use cancellations for tuition.
When setting up your cancellation causes, you decide for each one whether a student should receive a rescheduled lesson for a cancellation and/or receive a reimbursement. Most commonly, a student would receive a reimbursement if a lesson is planned to be re-scheduled, but then not actually booked in for whatever reason.
Any cancelled lessons which use a cancellation cause containing ‘yes’ for reimbursement will be reimbursed when running SpeedAdmin’s automatic reimbursement function.
You can find out more about setting up cancellation causes in our guide here.
Creating a List for Reimbursements (Lists > List library)
The list library contains a ready-made report for you to use in your reimbursements, ‘Reimbursements – all students’. This includes the IDs of all students who have an outstanding make-up lesson (i.e. the rescheduled booking is still sitting at the left-hand side of the teacher’s timetable) and/or are due a reimbursement as dictated by the cancellation cause used at the time of cancellation:
Copy this list, and amend as necessary – for example, if you do not give reimbursements for cancelled ensembles, you will need to add a filter to not include these. Similarly, you may want to turn off filters to include ALL students who have outstanding reimbursements, not just active students (e.g. students who have finished tuition within the last term):
This list will now be used to automatically allocate reimbursements to the relevant students.
Running the Reimbursement Function (Settings > Charge functions > Reimbursement
- Set a minimum about of cancellations before reimbursements are issued e.g. students are only reimbursed if they have 3+ cancellations (rarely used by UK services)
- Set a minimum fee before the reimbursement is applied e.g. students must be owed a minimum of £25 before the reimbursement is given (rarely used by UK services)
- Select a list to identify the students eligible for reimbursement – this is the list you created above.
- Select the charge rate that the reimbursements should be applied to.
- Select the tick box if you want reimbursements to be applied even if the student’s fees for that charge rate are lower than the reimbursement amount.
- Select the tick box if you want the reimbursements to be applied regardless of whether or not the student’s charges have already been invoiced.
- Select ‘Check list’ – this allows you to view the students and their reimbursement amounts before running the reimbursement function.
Top tip – the amount reimbursed is calculated by each individual student’s fees – i.e. how much they have been charged for that course throughout the year, the number of lessons they have, and any individual discounts/credits they have already received. Some reimbursement amounts may therefore look a little strange at first!
If you would like the reimbursement amount to be calculated using only the ‘fee per lesson’ as set on the relevant tuition fee, please contact SpeedAdmin Support who can change this for you. BUT, it is important to note that, if using the fee per lesson, this will ignore any individual discounts etc. and therefore the reimbursement amount may actually be too much for some students.
Once you are happy that the students listed, their number of cancellations and their reimbursement amounts are correct, select ‘Create reimbursements’. This will automatically add the reimbursements to the relevant students’ Charges tab, under the charge rate you selected above.
Important! - you will only be able to run this function once. You cannot run reimbursements again until the current ones have been invoiced/posted.
Finally, you now need to invoice/post the reimbursements.
If your service is running the reimbursement function at the end of the year, the reimbursements are now complete. Any outstanding re-scheduled lessons on the left-hand side of the teachers’ timetables will automatically be removed once you’ve moved into the new academic year.
Additional steps for termly reimbursements
If you are running the reimbursement function each term, you must be aware that the cancelled lessons which have been reimbursed WILL NOT be automatically removed from the left-hand side of the teachers’ timetable – these will still appear as outstanding re-scheduled lessons that can be booked. These lessons need to be removed, otherwise a teacher could still re-schedule them even though the student has already been reimbursed:
You will need to remove the reimbursed re-scheduled lessons from the students’ accounts.
Important – this cannot be completed in bulk! Each re-scheduled lesson must be selected individually:
- Go to the student’s Cancellations tab.
- Select ‘Show All’.
- On any cancellations which have now been reimbursed, tick the box marked ‘Re-scheduled (manual registration). This will then remove the outstanding rescheduled lesson from the left-hand side of the teacher’s timetable, so that it cannot be booked in error:
If you need any additional help in creating lists for reimbursements, or calculating the fee to be reimbursed, please contact the Support team.