Receipting payments

Go to Finance → Fee Payments.

The receipt list can be searched and filtered; this capture has no matching receipts.

Who can receive payments

An account needs Pay fees, Finance admin or a higher administrator permission to record or allocate a receipt. View only users can search, inspect, print and export previous receipts. When they also have Send fee balances, they can resend an issued receipt to a parent. Payment, allocation, reversal and bulk-upload actions remain unavailable to them. See Accounts and roles for the full permission guide.

Receipting a payment

1. Find the student by name or admission number.
2. Their outstanding invoices appear, by votehead.
3. Enter the amount received.
4. Choose the method — cash, cheque, bank transfer, M-Pesa or other — and record the reference: the M-Pesa code, cheque number or bank slip number.
5. Confirm the date. It defaults to today; if you are entering a bank deposit from last week, set the actual date so the cashbook is right.
6. Select Save.

The receipt number is generated by ShuleOne and cannot be edited.

Allocating across voteheads

Where a student owes several voteheads, the payment is allocated across them. Follow the school’s policy consistently — most schools clear tuition first — because an inconsistent allocation makes votehead-level income reports meaningless.

Printing

Receipts carry the school profile and stamp. If the letterhead is wrong, fix it there rather than reprinting from a corrected copy.

Previously issued receipts are always reachable — a parent who has lost theirs does not need a new one.

Group receipts

One payment covering several students — a parent with three children, or a sponsor paying for a group — is receipted once under Finance → Group Receipts.

Group receipts retain the source, student count, method, amount and reconciliation state.

Add each student and the amount going to them; the total must equal the payment. One receipt is issued, and each student’s account is credited with their share. Receipting these separately loses the connection between them, which makes the payment hard to trace when it is later queried.

Cheque and cash collections

Cheque and cash collection groups the day’s takings for banking.

Print the schedule, bank against it, and use it when you reconcile. This is what turns “the bank shows one deposit of 340,000” into a list of the receipts that made it up.

Viewing collections

Student Collections shows what has been collected over a period, by class, votehead or method.

Run it daily and reconcile against the cash actually banked. A daily check finds a mis-keyed receipt the same day; a monthly one finds it after the parent has left the country.

Overpayments

An overpayment sits as a credit on the student’s account and is set against the next term’s invoice automatically. It only needs action if the parent asks for the money back, which is a refund.

Correcting a mistake

Receipts are never deleted. To correct one, reverse it and issue a fresh one.

A reversal leaves three things visible: the original receipt, the reversal, and the replacement. That is what an auditor needs to see. Always record the reason.

Reverse when the amount, student, date or method is wrong. Do not reverse simply because a parent wants a receipt reprinted — reprint it.

Automatic bank-payment recovery never reissues a transaction code that already appears in receipt history. This includes a receipt that is awaiting reversal approval and one that has already been crossed. A reversal removes the accounting effect; it does not make the original bank or M-Pesa transaction a new payment. If the payment needs to be corrected or moved to another learner, complete the reversal and issue the correction deliberately in Receive Payment rather than waiting for automatic reconciliation. Automatic recovery checks recent payments from the previous two hours. If an older payment is still missing, review it in Unreconciled Payments or contact support instead of waiting for the automatic process.

Caution

If a receipt is reversed after the day’s takings have been banked and reconciled, tell whoever does the reconciliation. The bank statement will no longer match the receipts without an explanation.

Unreconciled payments

Unreconciled Payments lists money received that has not yet been matched to a bank statement line — typically bank transfers and mobile money that arrived without a clear reference. Clearing this list is part of bank reconciliation, and letting it grow is the fastest way to lose track of what the school actually holds.

The unallocated-receipts queue provides an Allocate action for each unmatched payment.

A crossed receipt may remain visible in history for audit purposes, but it must not return to this queue or be posted again automatically. If the same transaction code appears on a later valid receipt, stop processing that receipt and contact support so the duplicate can be reviewed before any further reversal is made.