Name the shape you sell in,
rather than inheriting it.
Schools sell in several shapes at once and usually only ever decided on the first one. It is worth listing them explicitly, because each carries different admin: who is invoiced, when, and what happens if one student in a group leaves.
Two of these cause most of the confusion. Per class looks like per student until a company books ten places and then sends nine people — the invoice is for the class, not the heads, and the contract should say so. Monthly is the one that drifts: a programme sold monthly with no stated end keeps charging into a term the student is not attending, which is the most common billing complaint families make about schools. Give every monthly plan an end.
On SprintUp, what you sell is configured as a product with a pricing model and a billing cycle — one-time or monthly — so the shape is a setting rather than a convention held in someone's head. Free products are worth configuring properly too: a taster session that is enrolled, registered and attended like any other class converts far better than one handled by email.
Sell the term.
Collect before you teach it.
A school that collects a term in advance has covered its costs before incurring them. A school that invoices monthly in arrears is permanently one month of teaching out of pocket, and tutors and teachers are paid on time regardless, so the gap is real money. The difference between the two schools is not revenue — it is when the same revenue arrives, and it decides whether the owner spends the term planning or reconciling.
Collecting up front also compresses the admin. One payment per student per term is one reconciliation, one moment where the policy is agreed and the card is captured, and one natural renewal conversation at the end rather than twelve small invoices with twelve chances to go wrong. Where families genuinely cannot pay a term at once — and some cannot — that is what the next section is for, designed rather than improvised.
A first payment,
then the rest across the course.
An instalment plan is a product, not a favour. Its structure is always the same: a larger first payment at enrolment, then the remaining balance divided across the months the course runs, charged automatically to the card already on file, ending when the course ends. Stated that way it is easy for a family to understand, easy for the office to reconcile, and — because the number of payments and the final date are published — free of the ambiguity that makes monthly billing go wrong.
On SprintUp, a monthly plan on a school product carries the number of months it runs for, and the checkout combines the first payment with a recurring monthly charge for the remaining instalments, which ends when the duration is up. Payments go to the school's own connected Stripe account. What the platform does not decide is the shape of your offer — how large the deposit is, how many months, and whether an instalment plan costs slightly more than paying in full. That is pricing, and the honest version is either "the same total, spread" or "a small administrative difference, stated"; what families dislike is discovering the difference afterwards.
Five things
that stop the phone call.
A tuition invoice is checked against what the family believes they agreed to, so it must contain the terms of that agreement, not just a total. Five items do it: the student; the course or programme by the name used when they enrolled; the period it covers, with the start and end dates and any weeks the school is closed; what has been paid and what remains, including the instalment schedule if there is one; and the policy reference — a line pointing to the withdrawal and refund terms they accepted.
Leave out anything the family has no business seeing: what the teacher is paid, internal notes, other students' names on a group invoice. And send it promptly, at enrolment rather than at the end of the month, because a family reconciling a document about something they did last week does it from memory, and a family reconciling one about six weeks ago does it by asking you.
Tax and invoice-format requirements — numbering, registered address, VAT treatment — differ by country and sit on top of all this. They are a question for your accountant; the items above are the ones that determine whether a parent pays without a conversation.
Decide the rules,
then let the price list say them.
Schools accumulate discounts the way they accumulate exceptions: a sibling rate agreed once, a staff child, an early-bird price that ran for one term and is still being honoured for three families. Within a couple of years nobody can say what anyone should be paying. The cure is to have a small number of named, published discounts — sibling, full-term-in-advance, returning student — each with a stated value and a rule for who qualifies, and to treat anything else as a one-off recorded against that family with a reason and an end date.
Scholarships and hardship places deserve the same treatment, and more discretion: decided by a named person against a written basis, recorded, and time-limited so that the school revisits rather than inherits them. A school that gives quietly and never reviews ends up unable to explain its own price list, which is the position from which fee increases become impossible.