Scenario:

How do I set up a payment plan?


Solution:


1. Click on the Pay Plans button (available from the Admin tab at the top of the screen on the Financial tab).
2. Choose the applicable session from the drop-down box on the Pay Plans page. Pay plans need to be set up each school year (session) in Gradelink, and cannot be copied from session to session.
3. Type the title of your pay plan (i.e.-  “10 Month Pay Plan” or “Trimester Pay Plan”) in the box below “Title” at the top of the page.
4. In each of the boxes below “Bill on”, enter in the dates that you would like to trigger the charges to appear on the student statement. Make sure to select a date before you would potentially run the next month’s statements.  For example, if you will be printing March statements the last week of February and would like the March tuition charge to appear on that statement, set the March “bill on” date to be a date prior to the last week in February.


Note: "The Pay Plans do not transfer from year to year.  This is because the bill-on dates for the pay plans would not be the same.  It is necessary to create new Pay Plans each year."  



  • In the boxes below the “Amount/Percentage”, enter in the percentage of the bill that will be allotted to that particular payment. So, for example, if I was on a ten month pay plan and I wanted each payment to be an equal amount of my total for the year, I would enter “10” in each of the boxes to indicate that I want to collect 10% of the total bill each month.The “amount/percentage” boxes are relative values, meaning that as long as I enter the same value in each of the boxes, the bill will be distributed equally among the payments. The benefit of entering in a percent or relative value into these boxes is that I can assign the same 10-Month pay plans to different total amounts. For example, I may want to assign a 10-Month pay plan to two students who have different tuition rates. This is not the area where you indicate the amount that a particular student will pay. This page is just for designating portions of the bill depending on the length of the billing schedule. The amount a particular student pays is indicated in a different area.
  • The description/prefix boxes will appear on your actual billing statements and can be helpful to provide further information as to why the charges have been distributed in a particular way. Typically for a monthly pay plan, the name of the particular month is most helpful as the “description/prefix” title. For quarterly pay plans, a title of “Fall” or “Quarter 1” would be helpful.
  • Click the save button at the bottom of the screen. You can configure multiple pay plans per session if your school offers students multiple pay plan options.


Note: If you place a student on a pay plan, do NOT manually add a transaction into the ledger if you have the transaction already scheduled on a pay plan. If you manually add a charge that is already covered by a pay plan, that student will end up with multiples of the same charge in the ledger and on their statements.