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Subsections


The Fees System

The Fee System is designed to provide a school specific Accounts Receivable (A/R) system to track all student billing and payments.

Image feesmain

The process is one of:

Set Predefined Fees

Predefined Fees are fees that may be stored along with all of their characteristics and periodically reused to quickly bill for certain fees.

The two main operations in this section are to:

  1. Add Predefined Fees - Add a new fee to be stored with other fees already defined. The characteristics are outlined below.
  2. View Predefined Fees - View existing fees. It also allows for the deletion of any unused fees. There is no edit function since fees can be easily added and deleted.

Predefined fees have the following characteristics (most of which are common to other fees as well):

  1. Name - A short phrase describing this fee or billing item.

  2. Description - A text field that may be used to describe the fee in more detail.

  3. Amount - The monetary value of the item or service.

  4. Discount - The percentage discount that may apply to certain individuals or groups (not used currently).

  5. Tax Flags - The taxes that may apply to this item or service in your tax jurisdiction. These are defined in your fees system configuration file and are set by your system admin. OA can have up to 4 taxes defined. Only values defined in this file will be visible in the form.

  6. Group Name - The name of a group of individuals that this fee applies to. If it can apply to all student then this and the group value would be left blank. The values of this field include Grade, Homeroom, Subject-Section, and Student Number. This would allow the application of this fee to certain groups based on their values in the group value field.

  7. Group Value - This may be a single value or a space separated list of values. If the Group Name above was Grade, then this list could be a list of grades: 9 10 11 12. If a Subject-Section, it could be a list of subjects that this applies to: Bio20-1 Bio20-2 Bio30-1 Bio30-3.

  8. Profiles - These are group names and values that are stored in the fees system configuration file. They replace the Group Name and Group Value above with a predefined group. This makes the creation of predefined values faster and less error prone. If using a profile, leave the group name and value blank. The profile value will override any values in these fields.

Assess Fees

This allows the addition of new student fees. When the Assess Fees button is clicked, you have 2 options:

  1. Create New - to create a new fee from scratch.

    Image feesassess

    Once you click this button, you can fill in the values:

    1. Date of this fee.

    2. Name - A short descriptive name for this fee or item. Words like tuition, lab fee, textbooks, etc.

    3. Description - A longer text description of the fee - such as Tuition - term 1, 2008 or Science Lab Fees - Chemistry.

    4. Amount - the cost of the item.

    5. Tax Checkboxes - depending on your jurisdiction, there may be from zero(0) to four (4) tax checkboxes that are applied to the amount above. If you have no taxes, no check boxes will appear. These are the taxes that will be added on to the above amount.

    6. Group - the group of students that this fee applies to. The selection list includes grade, homeroom, and student number. If you select grade and put a space separated list (10 11 12) then all students from grades 10 to 12 may have this fee applied to them. Later screens will allow you to unselect certain students from these grades. If only certain students have this fee applied you may leave this blank and only select certain students in later screens. You choose whichever method is faster for you.

    7. Checked - if checked, the next screen with student names will be all selected. If this box is unchecked, then the snext screen will have none selected.

  2. Use Predefined - Clicking this button presents you with a list of the predefined fees. You click the select button for one of them and continue on to the next screen showing student lists and the characteristics of this fee.

The next screen will show your entered values for fees and a list of all students this fee may apply to.

Image feesasses-student

This screen shows the options chosen in the previous screen (including a gst tax) for lab coats, and then a list of selected students. Unselect students this doesn't apply to and click the Continue button at the bottom of the screen.

The final screen confirms the storage of the fee records and provides links back to the main fees system page or to allow the addition of more fees.

View Assessed Fees is a simple viewing script to show the current fees journal files (and also looks up the student name in the second column). It will be replaced with a more sophisticated script based on school needs.

Invoices

The Print Outstanding Invoices is a script to create paper based (pdf) invoices for delivery to parents.

The first screen requests the date to appear on the invoices. The second screen provides the link to download the generated pdf (and print them, if desired). The View Log File link provides access to the log file generated along with the pdf (and will contain any errors in the process.

The invoice pdf prints only outstanding fees due. It is a single page per student report. It includes the values for each outstanding fee and a total at the bottom. Simple stuff.

Payments

The payments script starts out with a student search with the usual lastname, firstname or lastname or initials or student number input. Once entered, the search results screen shows all matching students with an Accept Payment button for each.

Image payments-student

Once one of the buttons is clicked, the next screen provides information about the outstanding fees and the total amount due.

Image payments1

The payment date is the date of payment (normally today). The next line identifies student (including local student number). The next line(s) list the outstanding fees and the name, description, and amount of each. A checkbox indicates that this fee is to be paid.

If are not going to pay that fee, uncheck the box. Then click the recalculate button and the total payment will be recalculated. The screen now looks like the one below:

Image payments2

Once you click the Accept Payment button, the payment is made and all fees are marked as paid. The next screen confirms payment and provides a link to print out a receipt for this payment (although this may be done later also).

Your payment is now complete.

Print Receipts - a script to allow student searches, and the printing of individual receipts.

Export Monthly Summary

This script will export monthly summary transactions so that they may be imported into an accounting system used by the school. The summaries are downloaded in a CSV (Comma Separated Value) format that can easily be imported into accounting systems or spreadsheets.

There are 2 simple steps in using the script. The first is to indicate the year and month you wish to export. It will default to the current month if near the end of the month and to the previous month if near the start of the month. You enter in a yyyy-mm format (no day of month is required).

The second step is to click on the link and download the CSV file and save it on your local computer to input this information into your accounting system. The fees system is designed to provide simple A/R (Accounts Receivable) functions.

Work Flow - Technical

The fees subsystem workflow is:

  1. Fees are charged to students. These could include tuition, books, labs, etc. Each fee adds a record to the fees journal (fees_jrl) and fills in the id, studnum (student number), transaction date (trans_date), transaction type (trans_type is chg), and information about the fee (name, description, subtotal, and the shortnames and values for up to 4 taxes, and then a total for these values).

    The paid field (paid_id) remains NULL. This field holds the id of the payment record when payments are made.

  2. The invoicing process is simply a reporting process. Print invoices will normally be run and mailed. The parent site should also allow viewing of outstanding charges, etc.

  3. The payment process will create a new payment transaction record in the fees journal (fees_jrl). It will only fill in limited fields and leave the rest NULL. The fields added are id (auto), student number (studnum), date of payment (trans_date), and a transaction type (trans_type) = pay. The name field will be Payment (or alternate language equivalent). The total field will store the amount of the payment (as a negative number). The description field lists id's of the fees paid.

    The it paid_id field for payments stores the receipt number for the payment. This number is obtained from the receiptnumber file in /etc and is incremented for each payment. It works exactly like the studentnumber file in the same location which holds the next available student number for student enrollment.

    The other fields will remain NULL in the record (subtotal and all tax fields).

    All fees records that are paid will have their paid_id field filled in with the id of the payment transaction that does this.

Operations

  1. Printing/Reprinting payment receipts

  2. Printing an Account Statement

  3. Printing a historical bill of transactions

Table Structures

CREATE TABLE fees_jrl (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  studnum int(11) default NULL,
  trans_date date default NULL,
  trans_type varchar(8) default NULL,
  name varchar(255) default NULL,
  description text,
  subtotal decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  tax1 decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  tax1_name varchar(16) default NULL,
  tax2 decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  tax2_name varchar(16) default NULL,
  tax3 decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  tax3_name varchar(16) default NULL,
  tax4 decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  tax4_name varchar(16) default NULL,
  total decimal(10,2) default NULL,
  paid_id int(11) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

The second table stores predefined fees to allow quick application to particular students or student groups.

CREATE TABLE fees_predefined (
  id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  name varchar(16) default NULL,
  description varchar(255) default NULL,
  amount double default NULL,
  discount double default NULL,
  tax1_flag char(1) default NULL,
  tax2_flag char(1) default NULL,
  tax3_flag char(1) default NULL,
  tax4_flag char(1) default NULL,
  group_name varchar(32) default NULL,
  group_value varchar(32) default NULL,
  profile varchar(32) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM;


next up previous contents
Next: The Schedule System Up: Open Administration for Schools Previous: The Report Card System

2010-07-18