Meals are billed on their own invoices, separate from academic fees. A pupil can hold an academic invoice and a feeding invoice for the same term, and the two never merge.
Why they are separate
Feeding is a different kind of debt. It accrues daily, it is often prepaid, and it stops the moment a pupil leaves — none of which is true of tuition. Keeping the ledgers apart means:
- Meal arrears do not look like tuition arrears in your reports
- A family can prepay a term of meals while still owing tuition, and both figures stay honest
- A payment can be directed at meals specifically — see Allocation
What a feeding invoice is built from
Three things:
- The class’s feeding rate and the cadence discount
- The pupil’s feeding plan, including any price override
- The meal days on the term calendar
A day the kitchen was closed is not a day anyone is billed for, provided the calendar says so.
An unfinished calendar produces wrong feeding bills. If holidays are not marked as non-meal days, families are charged for meals that were never served. Finish the calendar before running feeding billing.
Running it
Feeding billing runs like academic billing: preview, check the pupil count, then issue. The same guard applies — one feeding invoice per pupil, per term, per period — so a repeated run cannot double-bill.
Pupils whose plan is None are not billed.
Reconciling against meals actually served
Where a pupil prepaid for more meals than they ate — an absence, or a withdrawal mid-term — the difference is settled with a credit note against the feeding invoice rather than by editing it. See Corrections.
Who can do this
The edit_finances permission.