IN THIS ARTICLE:
Review iClassPro's Billing Operations Checklist, which is intended to give your business a set of guidelines and best practices for your billing process with iClassPro. The checklist provides a list of tasks that most businesses will run over each billing cycle to stay on top of issuing charges and collecting payments from customers.
NOTE: Because every business works differently, it is important to note that what works best for your business may be a little different than the recommendations below.
Billing Operations Checklist
| Task Description | Example Monthly Schedule |
| [ 1. ] Process New Enrollments & Online Activity | Daily Task |
| [ 2. ] Keep Charge Categories Consistent | Daily Task |
| [ 3. ] Run Recurring Billing Report | At least one week prior to billing |
| [ 4. ] Run Category List Report | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 5. ] Process Class Tuition charges | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 6. ] Process Camp Tuition charges | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 7. ] Process Anniversary charges | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 8. ] Apply Account Credits | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 9. ] Mail/Email Statements | January 20, 2019 |
| [ 10. ] Apply Account Credits (again) | February 01, 2019 |
| [ 11. ] Draft Stored Payment Information | February 01, 2019 |
| [ 12. ] Process Late Fees | February 05. 2019 |
| [ 13. ] Drop Class Enrollments for Unpaid Accounts | February 10, 2019 |
1. Processing New Enrollments & Online Activity
Employees should stay on top of creating, approving, transferring and dropping enrollments as requests come in from the Customer Portal through the Online Activity window. If an enrollment is created by or approved by a staff member manually, no charges or payments will be recorded on the customer's ledger automatically.
Types of Enrollment
Paper or Form Requests (manual staff enrollment) find or create the family and student account, then create or edit their enrollment(s). More about new enrollments.
Customer Portal Requests (online registration) the online activity interface available from the home page or the icon at the bottom of iClassPro is used to process incoming requests and track changes in family and student information. More about online activity.
2. Keeping up with Charge Categories
Charge Categories are labels that are created and attached when billing, to uniquely identify charges incurred by customers (usually in reference to a billing period or specific misc fee). For example, businesses which bill classes monthly will likely have charge categories created for each month's tuition (January Tuition, February Tuition, etc.). When used properly, the charge category will also allow you to detect whether a customer has already been charged tuition for a specific billing period. More about Charge Categories.
3. Run Recurring Billing Report
At least one week prior to the day of billing, you will want to find out which customers may not have any saved payment information on file, or whose payment method may be about to expire/has expired so you can reach out to them to update the information. This will help reduce the number of declined payments and may help prevent chargeback cases. The Recurring Billing Report (FIN-9) can help with this.
To run the report for families without any payment information on file:
- Go to REPORTS>FINANCIAL>RECURRING BILLING REPORT.
- Choose “Without Payment Information” under PAYMENT INFORMATION STATUS.
- Select “Currently Enrolled (Active)” and “Enrolled in the Future (Only)” under STATUS (ENROLLMENT).
- Generate the report in whichever format you choose.
To run the report for families whose payment information has expired/will expire in the forthcoming month:
- Go to REPORTS>FINANCIAL>RECURRING BILLING REPORT.
- Choose “With Payment Information” under PAYMENT INFORMATION STATUS.
- Choose both “With Recurring Billing” and “Without Recurring Billing” under RECURRING BILLING STATUS.
- Select “Currently Enrolled (Active)” and “Enrolled in the Future (Only)” under STATUS (ENROLLMENT).
- Set “Expiration Month” to the month you are billing for to find cards that are about to expire (based on the charge category you will use), or the previous month (to find cards that have already expired).
- Set “Expiration Year” to current year
- Generate the report in whichever format you choose
More about the Recurring Billing Report.
4. Run Category List Report
Depending on how you have your Auto Charge Scheduler configured, you may have a single charge category set for class tuition charges created through the Customer Portal. If a customer registers close to the end of the month, they may be charged a prorated amount (if there are still billable class dates in the month) or charged in full for the following month (if there are no billable class dates left). This can occasionally result in a customer being charged twice. (See the "Auto Charge Scheduler" document for more information about how the system determines which Charge Category to assign to tuition charges created via the Customer Portal.)
To help keep this from happening, we recommend running a Category List Report (FIN-6) prior to billing to locate these families. Running the list for the last 14 days of the month is generally sufficient to find these as anyone who enrolled prior to that would have been charged a prorated amount for the current month and should be charged for the next month.
To run the report:
- Go to REPORTS>FINANCIAL>CATEGORY LIST
- Set your date range to the last 14 days of the month (for example, for February you’d choose 2/14/2019-2/28/2019). This will find only charges that were created within that date range.
- Set the Charge Category to match the one specified by the Auto Charge Scheduler under SETTINGS>SETUP>CLASS SETTINGS>OTHER CLASS SETTINGS.
- Generate the report in whichever format you choose.
Look over the report at the total amount billed. If the charge is prorated to two weeks of tuition or less (based on the amount), these customers should be charged again for the next month. If the amount shown is for three weeks or more of tuition, these customers have already paid for the forthcoming month and should not be billed again.
Mark these students and have the report available for the next step of the billing process. More about the Category List Report.
5. Processing Class Tuition Charges
When a student registers for a class, they are assigned to a specific billing schedule (ex: monthly, session, etc). On the Transactions page, the Class Tuition task allows you to post charges for all students enrolled in a particular billing schedule at once. More about Class Tuition Charges.
6. Processing Camp Tuition Charges
If students are paying in full for camps when they register online or if your business does not regularly run camps, you can skip this step of the process. It is most useful for businesses that do not auto-approve camp enrollments and may have missed billing some students.
Under the Transactions page, the Camp Tuition will process charges for every student enrolled in a camp on a specific date. Staff can choose to bill for an initial Deposit on the camp or for the Full Unbilled Amount of the camp tuition according to the pricing schedule. More about Camp Tuition Charges.
7. Processing Anniversary Charges
If your business has chosen not to use our built-in Anniversary Charges feature, skip this step.
Anniversary charges are typically an annual or semi-annual fee for students who are actively registered at your facility. Anniversary fees can be charged either once per active family or once per active student. Additionally, you can choose to process anniversary charges for only class students, only camp students or for both class and camp students. More about Anniversary Charges.
8. Applying Credits
If a customer has account credit on their ledger from paying in advance or simply a credit issued to their account by your business, that credit can be applied either A) individually from their family ledger to specific charges or B) mass applied for all families with credits and one or more outstanding charges on their ledger. To perform this task globally, go to the Transactions page, click on Payments on the left-hand side and choose "Apply Credits" from the AutoPayment Task drop down menu. More about Applying Credits.
9. Mailing/Emailing Statements
After adding charges to family ledgers and applying any credits to those charges, the next step is letting the customers know that they have an outstanding bill. We recommend doing this approximately 10 days before charges are due and payments are drafted from stored payment information. This is because most major card brands require advance notice of charges before recurring payments take place to help avoid customer disputes (chargebacks).
Statements list any outstanding charges on customer accounts, their current ledger balance, last payment date and class schedule. Statements can be printed as a PDF for mail-ready documents or Processed to both email customers and generate a PDF copy for business records. More about Statements.
10. Applying Credits (again)
It's a good idea to apply credits a second time right before processing the payments (in case customers have made payments in person, that did not get applied toward charges).
To apply credits on all family ledgers that have both an outstanding charge and account credit, go to the Transactions page, click on Payments on the left-hand side and choose "Apply Credits" from the AutoPayment Task drop down menu. More about Applying Credits.
11. Drafting Stored Payment Information
To collect payments from customers with outstanding charges and stored payment information, go to the Transactions page and select Payments on the left-hand side. For security and accuracy, we require a staff member to initiate and oversee the processing of payments using stored payment information. This gives businesses the opportunity to spot potential billing errors before incurring transaction fees from the payment processor.
12. Processing Late Charges
Late Fees are fees which occur when the charges on an account become overdue (passed their due date). In iClassPro, an account becomes eligible for late fees the day after the due date entered for the charge. Late charges are processed from the Transactions page. More about Late Charges.
13. Dropping Class Enrollments for Unpaid Accounts
Staff members can add a drop date to class enrollments in bulk if the customer has failed to pay for a class tuition charge using the Class Drops tool. This tool can also be used to drop all classes in a program or billing schedule. Go to the Transactions page to begin this task. More about Class Drops.