Most small schools run tuition on an invoice sent by email and a bank statement checked by hand, and most describe the result as a cash-flow problem. It is not cash flow. It is unpaid work, and it compounds: a family that has attended for six weeks without paying has learned that the school does not collect, and every invoice to that family afterwards is a negotiation rather than a bill. Meanwhile the teachers were paid on time, because they have to be, so the shortfall is real money that the school has lent to its customers at no interest and without deciding to.
None of the fix requires a finance team. It requires four decisions made once — how the school prices, when the money is taken, what happens when a payment fails, and what the platform takes — and then applied to everyone, politely, from week one. This cluster covers all four. The tutoring-centre billing cluster covers the same ground for centres selling packages of sessions; this one is for schools selling courses, terms and programmes.
The single decision that separates schools with a billing problem from schools without one is when the money arrives relative to the teaching. A school that sells a term in advance has its costs covered before it incurs them; a school that invoices monthly in arrears is always one month of teaching out of pocket, and one bad month from being unable to pay staff. Selling the term also makes every other part of the system easier: one payment per student per term to reconcile, one moment of contact where the policy is agreed, and a natural renewal conversation at the end.
The objection is real: not every family can pay a term up front, and a school that insists on it will lose students it wanted. That is what instalments are for, and it is why they belong in the design rather than being improvised for individual families. A published plan — a first payment at enrolment and the remainder spread monthly across the course — is a product the school offers, priced deliberately. An ad-hoc arrangement agreed by text with one parent is a precedent, an unpaid balance, and something nobody else in the office knows about.
Schools sell in more shapes than tutoring centres do, and it is worth naming yours rather than inheriting it. Per student is the default for open-enrolment courses. Per class suits a school selling a whole group to an institution — a company booking a course for its staff, a state school buying a workshop. Per school, or a single negotiated fee, is how corporate and institutional contracts usually land. A one-time price fits a short course or a summer programme; a monthly price fits an ongoing programme with no fixed end.
On SprintUp, what a school sells is defined as a product with a pricing model and a billing cycle: one-time or monthly, with a monthly plan carrying the number of months it runs for. That is what makes a deposit-plus-instalments plan a thing you configure once and sell repeatedly rather than a spreadsheet you maintain per family. The first article goes through the models and the instalment mechanics in detail.
A tuition invoice is read by someone deciding whether it matches what they agreed to. It needs the student, the course or programme, the period it covers, what was paid and what remains, and the dates of any instalments still to come. An invoice that says "Autumn term — €480" with no breakdown is an invitation to a phone call; one that shows the course, the twelve weeks it covers, the two public holidays excluded and the balance after the deposit is paid without comment.
Where a course is billed monthly, the family needs to know how many payments there are and when the last one falls, because the most common billing complaint in schools is a parent who believed they were paying for a course and discovers a subscription that has quietly continued into a term their child is not attending. State the count and the end date on the invoice and in the confirmation, and end the plan when the course ends.
Payments fail for boring reasons — an expired card, a bank flagging an unusual charge, a limit reached on the day — and the first response should be equally boring: a retry and a neutral notice inviting the family to update the card. Treating every failure as a collection problem embarrasses the ninety percent for whom it is an administrative event, and exhausts whoever is sending the messages.
What is left after that is arrears: a family who is not paying and has not said why. The rule that works is a short published timeline — retry, message, a call from a person, then a stated consequence — applied on the days it says, to everyone. A school that lets one family run to six weeks has changed its policy for every family who hears about it, and schools are places where families talk. The second article sets out the timeline, the call that resolves most of it, and the separate exception process for the family who tells you in advance that they cannot pay this month, which deserves a decision rather than a drift.
Some school and tutoring platforms charge a percentage of every payment a student makes, on top of the subscription, and some charge a smaller percentage even on payments they did not process. At forty students it reads as a rounding error. At four hundred it is the largest line on the invoice, and it grows with the school forever, which is the defining property of revenue-linked pricing: cheapest when you are small, most expensive when you have succeeded.
Ask every vendor for the number in writing and multiply it by the tuition you expect in year three rather than this term. On SprintUp the answer is zero: students and families pay the school directly through Stripe on the school's own connected account, and SprintUp takes 0% of that payment on every plan including the free one, with standard Stripe processing fees applying as they would anywhere. The third article explains how these fees are structured across the market and what to ask, and the TutorCruncher and Teachworks comparisons show the published figures with the sizes at which each is cheaper.
Billing is getting the right amount from the right family for the right course, on time. Accounting is tax, VAT where it applies, payroll, and the books a school files. A school with staff needs both, and they are different systems: SprintUp is the first and is not the second. Let the platform hold products, payments and what each family owes, let an accounting package hold the books, and let the payment records feed the accounts rather than asking either to be the other. Invoice-format and tax requirements differ by country and belong with your accountant, not with a software decision.
How to structure and invoice tuition including instalments, what to do when payments fail, and how to read the platform fee that never appears on a feature list.