Set Up Termly Fees in SqoolHQ in 15 Minutes

Every term, the same questions hit the bursar’s office: what does each student owe, who has paid, and what is the balance when the report card goes out? In SqoolHQ, the answers all start with one thing — your fee structure. Set it up once, and every payment, balance, and parent statement falls into place automatically.

What fee items are

Fee items are the building blocks of billing — the things your school charges for: tuition, uniform, lunch, transport, examination fees, and so on. In SqoolHQ you manage them under Finance → Fee structure, where each item has a name (e.g. “Tuition — Term 1”) and an amount.

How it works

1. Add a fee item with a name and amount for each thing your school bills in the term.
2. Items are billed against the current period — your term or semester.
3. When a parent pays, you record the payment against a fee item — and that’s what makes Balances and the parent portal’s fee statement add up correctly.

The structure is simple on purpose: the payment is always attached to a named item, so at term end you can see exactly what has been collected for tuition, for lunch, for transport — and which students still owe on each.

Three tips from real use

Set the structure before recording payments. If payments start landing before items exist, you’re left matching money to headings afterwards. Fifteen minutes of setup at term start saves an hour of sorting at term end.

Editing an amount only affects future billing. Made a typo on an item, or need to change next term’s fee? Edit it — already-recorded payments are never rewritten. The ledger stays honest, which is exactly what parents and auditors expect.

Changing your school type doesn’t touch fees. If you ever change the school type or framework in Settings (which rebuilds classes and subjects), your fee structure stays exactly as it is — one less thing to redo.

The payoff

With the structure in place, recording a payment is one tap: pick the student, pick the item, note the reference (cash, bank slip, or mobile money), done. The student’s balance updates instantly, the receipt prints in a click, and the parent portal shows the statement — no spreadsheets, no “whose balance is this?” conversations at clearance time.

If your school is new to SqoolHQ, this is the step to do first — it makes everything after it (payments, balances, report-card clearance) run on rails. And if you’re still weighing whether a fee structure is worth setting up before payments arrive: trust us, it is.