Family actions

A family is not a row in ShuleOne. It is one parent with several learners, and most of the work a bursar does for them — taking a payment, chasing a balance, agreeing terms — used to mean opening each child in turn. These actions treat the family as the thing you are dealing with.

What’s new — 28 September 2026

Four actions now sit on a parent’s record: one payment for the whole family, move a credit to a sibling, payment plan and merge a duplicate. Payment plans are new — the instalments a family agreed are recorded against them and the register shows whether they are keeping to it.

Note

These appear once your school has the parent register enabled. Until then, use Receipts and Students as before — nothing you already do has changed.

One payment for the whole family

A parent hands over one amount for three children. Previously that meant three receipts and deciding the split in your head.

Open the parent, select Take one payment, enter the amount and choose how it divides:

Equally between the children — the same amount each. Odd cents go to the first child listed, so the receipt always totals exactly what was handed over.

In proportion to what each owes — the child who owes most receives most.

Oldest debt first — clears everything the family carried forward from previous terms, across all the children, before any of this term’s fees. This is usually what a parent means when they say “put it towards the arrears”.

I will enter the amounts — you decide each line.

Whichever you choose, you can edit any line before posting. The total of the lines must match the amount received exactly, to the cent; the screen will not let you post until it does. This is one receipt, so it appears on each child’s statement as their share and reconciles as a single deposit.

Note

One receipt, but still one receipt text per child — a receipt belongs to a learner, so each child’s is a separate record and a separate message. A three-child family payment is one receipt on your books and three texts on your bill. The family fee-balance message is the one that replaces three sends with one.

Caution

Splitting by what each child owes needs the family’s fee balances. If your school has not yet had that part switched on, the screen says so and those two options are unavailable. An equal split and entering the amounts yourself both work regardless.

Move a credit to a sibling

One child is overpaid, another is in arrears, and it is the same parent’s money.

Select Move a credit to a sibling. ShuleOne has already worked out which child holds the credit, how much of it is available, and which siblings are behind. Adjust the amount if you want to move less than all of it, then confirm.

No cash moves. Both children’s statements show the transfer, so a parent asking “where did that go” can be answered from either record.

Nobody is told automatically. Neither learner’s parent gets a message when a credit moves. If the family should know — and usually they should, because the child who was in credit no longer is — tell them yourself.

You cannot move more than the child actually holds. If nobody in the family is in credit, or no sibling is behind, the screen tells you rather than opening an empty form.

Payment plan

A parent cannot pay in full and you agree instalments. Until now that lived in a notebook or a WhatsApp screenshot, and nobody else at the school knew about it.

Select Payment plan and record:

• Total agreed and the instalments — a date and an amount for each. They must add up to the total.
• Counts payments from — fees paid before this date are not counted towards the arrangement. Without it, money the family paid in January would make a June agreement look already settled.
• Which learners the plan covers. Fixed when you record it: a sibling admitted in October has not joined a September arrangement.
• Agreed with — the director or bursar whose decision this was. Often someone without a ShuleOne login, so it is free text.

How ShuleOne decides whether they are keeping to it

Payments are not matched to particular instalments, because families do not pay that way. Instead, by each due date a running total should have arrived. If it has, that instalment counts as paid; if it has not, it counts as missed.

Two things follow, and both are deliberate:

• A family who pays two instalments at once is not marked late for the next one.
• A family who falls behind and then catches up stops being shown as behind.

Only valid receipts count. A receipt that was reversed or refunded does not, because the school does not have that money — a family is not up to date on the strength of a payment that was given back.

The result appears on the parent’s record and on the parent register as a single line: 2 of 4 instalments missed — 10,000 behind.

Recording a plan sends nothing to the parent. Neither does cancelling one, and neither does a missed instalment. The plan is the school’s record of what was agreed, not an agreement the parent receives a copy of. If you want them to have the dates in writing, send them yourself — and be aware that a colleague looking at this screen will see the arrangement and may reasonably assume the family was told.

To stop a plan applying, Cancel it and say why. Plans are never deleted: you need to be able to show what was agreed and when it stopped.

Merge a duplicate parent

The same parent gets entered twice — usually when a second child is admitted and the details are retyped instead of found. The two records have different phone numbers, so ShuleOne cannot tell they are one person. Someone at the school has to recognise them.

Danger

Merging moves learners, WhatsApp conversations, app notifications and portal access from one record to another. Read the preview before you confirm. Only an Admissions administrator can do this.

Open the record you want to keep, select Merge a duplicate, and enter the other record’s number. Then Check what will move.

Nothing has been touched at this point. You are shown:

• Both records side by side — names, phone numbers and children. If you have the wrong number, this is where it will be obvious.
• Everything that will move, itemised. Learner links, WhatsApp conversations, app notifications, messages, support cases, service requests, absence notices and any payment plan.
• Anything already on the record you are keeping. If both records list the same child in the same slot, the duplicate’s copy is removed rather than moved, because the kept record already has it.
• What stays behind. Sign-in history remains with the retired record. It is a log of what happened on that account, and moving it would make the kept record claim sign-ins that were never made against it.

Say why the two records are the same person, then confirm.

If anything is wrong, the merge is refused and the reason is shown rather than being attempted half-way. That includes a record with learners at another school — that merge has to be done by someone with access to both.

Afterwards

The duplicate record is not deleted. It keeps its name, phone and email, but it loses its portal access, so a parent signing in with the old number no longer reaches a working account. Anything that pointed at the old record number — a report you printed last term, a saved link — now opens the kept record, and the page says which one you landed on.

A merge can be undone. Registration → Parents keeps a history of every merge, who did it and why, and reversing one puts every item back where it came from.

Note

Two guardians who share one telephone number are not duplicates. ShuleOne stores one record per number by design, and that is correct — do not merge them apart or together on the strength of the shared number alone.

Add a sibling

Select Add a sibling to start an admission with this parent’s contacts, national ID, occupation and address already filled in, along with the other parent where there is one.

This is worth using rather than starting from Students. The retyping it saves is what creates duplicate parent records in the first place.