Voteheads and fee structures

Voteheads

A votehead is a single charge — Tuition, Boarding, Transport, Lunch, Activity, Exams, Development. Everything the school bills is a votehead, and every payment is receipted against one.

Go to Finance → Voteheads.

Select Students beside a votehead to see every learner billed under it for the selected year and term. You can filter the list by class or student status, search by admission number or name, and print or export the result.

Staff with View only or Set fee structure can inspect this list without being able to add, edit or delete voteheads. Votehead maintenance remains restricted to a finance administrator.

Select Add New.

Field	Notes
Name	As it should appear on the invoice and receipt.
Account	The ledger account income posts to.
Type	Whether it is recurring each term or a one-off.
Refundable	Whether a refund can be raised against it.

The account mapping is the part people skip and regret. It is what makes fee income appear correctly in the income and expenditure statement. A votehead with no account collects money that then has to be journalled into place by hand.

How many voteheads?

Enough to answer the questions the school actually asks of its accounts, and no more. If the board wants to know what transport costs versus what transport collects, transport must be its own votehead. If nobody will ever ask, folding it into tuition is simpler.

Splitting a votehead later is painful — historic invoices keep the old one — so give this ten minutes of thought before the first billing run.

Fee structures

A fee structure says how much a class pays under each votehead in a term. Go to Finance → Fee Structures.

The page is divided into three tabs:

• Fee structures — create structures, review voteheads and assign charges.
• Sponsored students — maintain the term-specific learners excluded from bulk billing.
• Documents — manage the printable fee documents sent through WhatsApp.

Fee structures can be filtered by class, term, curriculum and financial year.

For each class and term, enter the amount per votehead. A blank means that class is not charged that votehead at all — day scholars have no boarding line.

Each line also has an Applies to setting:

• All students invoices current learners when the structure is assigned to a class.
• New students only stays prospective during class-wide or boarder-wide assignment and is added when a new learner is admitted.

Assigning a structure

Open a structure’s assignment screen, select the financial year and term, then choose one of these paths:

• By class invoices every current learner in the selected class for All students lines. New students only lines remain ready for later admissions.
• By student applies the complete structure to the learners you deliberately add, including New students only lines. Use this for newly admitted learners who were registered before the class structure was attached, or whose automatic admission billing did not run.
• Invoice all boarding students is a bulk assignment. Like class assignment, it leaves New students only lines prospective.

After saving a per-student assignment, reopen the same structure, year and term to see the assigned learners and their invoiced amounts. Removing a learner from that list and saving unassigns the structure’s individual invoice rows for that learner.

Tip

For a mid-term admission, add the learner under By student and confirm the success message reports student invoice items greater than zero. Then spot-check the learner’s statement before sending it to the parent.

Sponsored students for a term

Use the Sponsored students tab on Finance → Fee Structures when a learner’s entire class fee is paid outside the parent ledger and the learner should not receive a normal invoice. Sponsorship is recorded by financial year and term; it is not a permanent setting on the student’s profile.

1. Open the Sponsored students tab and select the year and term before invoicing classes.
2. Choose Manage list, search by name or admission number, and add the sponsored learners.
3. Review the list and choose Save list.
4. In a later term, use Copy previous term, remove learners whose sponsorship ended, and add newly sponsored learners before billing.

The saved list is excluded from By class, Invoice all boarding students, admission-triggered class billing and Term Billing Copy. By student remains an intentional override when the finance office really does need to charge a sponsored learner individually.

The system refuses to newly mark a learner as sponsored when they already have a valid fee receipt in that term. Reverse or transfer that receipt first so money is never left without the invoice it settled.

Caution

Editing the sponsored list does not remove invoices that already exist. For an invoice raised before the learner was added, first confirm the learner has no receipt in that term, then void the existing invoice through the controlled billing-amendment workflow.

Copying a structure forward

Most terms are a small adjustment on the last one. Term Billing Copy copies a term’s structure into the next term, where you adjust the figures that changed rather than rebuilding the table.

Do this at the start of the term, before billing. Copying after students have been billed does not re-bill them.

Checking a structure before you bill

Read the table once, across and down:

• Across a class — does the total match what the fee circular told parents? This is the check that matters most; a structure that disagrees with the circular generates a term of complaints.
• Down a votehead — is every class that should be charged, charged?
• Boarders and day scholars — do they differ where they should, and only where they should?

Caution

Changing a fee structure after a term has been billed does not change existing invoices. Correct the structure and then adjust the affected students through individual billing, or reverse and re-run the term’s billing before any payments have been receipted.

What’s new

2 September 2026

Staff with View only or Set fee structure can now open Voteheads and inspect, print or export the students billed under a selected votehead. These permissions do not allow the staff member to add, edit or delete voteheads.

25 August 2026

Sponsored learners can now be maintained separately for each year and term. Whole-class, boarder-wide, admission and term-copy billing skip the selected learners, and the list can be copied from the preceding term and reviewed before invoicing.

The Fee Structures page now separates structure setup, sponsored learners and printable documents into dedicated tabs, making each workflow easier to find.

24 August 2026

Per-student fee-structure assignment now invoices the full structure, including lines marked New students only. The assignment screen also reloads explicitly assigned learners so their invoices can be checked or unassigned.