Skip to main content
A fee category is a named discount you attach to a pupil: Staff child 50%, Scholarship 100%, Sibling concession 10%. Set the category once, assign pupils to it, and every billing run applies it without anyone remembering to.

How the discount is expressed

Discounts are held in basis points — hundredths of a percent. Basis points exist so a discount like 7.5% is exact rather than a repeating decimal, which keeps a discounted bill and its payments in agreement to the pesewa.

What a discount actually touches

A category only reduces fee items marked discountable. Anything with that flag switched off is billed in full, to every pupil, whatever category they are in — including a pupil on a 100% scholarship.
That is the intended behaviour: it is how you stop a scholarship from silently absorbing an examination fee you have to remit to GES. But it does mean a “100%” category rarely produces a zero bill, and parents will ask why. The answer is on the invoice, which names every line. See Fee items for setting the flag.

Assigning a pupil to a category

A fee category is attached to a pupil’s enrolment for a term, not to the pupil record itself. One category per pupil per term. This matters at promotion: a concession does not follow a pupil into the next term on its own. When you promote a class you carry the category forward deliberately, which is your yearly opportunity to review it — see Closing the term. You can list every pupil currently on a given category, which is the check to run before billing: it is much easier to spot a pupil who should not be on the staff rate here than to find the discount later on an issued invoice.
Review category assignments at the start of every term, before you bill. A concession agreed for one term has a way of quietly continuing into the next.

Changing a discount

Editing a category changes what future billing runs calculate. Invoices already issued keep the discount they were issued with, because an issued invoice does not change. To apply a newly agreed concession to a bill that has already gone out, issue a credit note instead.

Who can edit it

The edit_finances permission. Larger concessions can be put behind approve_waivers so that a discount is agreed by someone other than the person entering it.