Nothing in EduControl’s finance records is edited after the fact. An issued invoice keeps its total; a recorded payment keeps its amount. Putting something right means adding a new, recorded event that says what changed and why.
That is what makes the books defensible a year later. It also means choosing the right instrument.
Which one do I need?
A credit note and a refund are not interchangeable. A credit note moves what is owed. A refund moves cash. Reaching for a credit note when money has to leave the building leaves your ledger saying you still hold cash you have handed over.
Credit notes
A credit note reduces what a family owes on an invoice that has already been issued. Use it for a scholarship agreed after billing, a goodwill reduction, a sibling discount applied late, or a billing error in the school’s favour.
Three kinds are recorded:
A credit note is applied against specific invoice lines and carries a reason. Because it reduces what must be paid, a partly paid invoice can become fully Paid through a credit note without any further cash.
Voiding a payment
Void a payment that should never have been recorded — keyed twice, entered against the wrong pupil, or a cheque that bounced.
Voiding unwinds every allocation the payment made and restores the invoices it had settled. The payment stays visible as a voided record; it does not vanish.
Voiding reverses the receipt of money. If the cash genuinely arrived and now has to go back to the parent, you want a refund, not a void.
Refunds
A refund records money leaving the school: an overpayment returned, a withdrawal mid-term, a duplicate payment that was genuinely banked.
Refunds have a request-and-approve lifecycle:
Someone requests the refund
With the amount and a reason. Its status is Pending.
Somebody else approves or rejects it
Approving reverses the relevant allocations; rejecting closes it with the reason recorded.
The person who requested a refund cannot approve it. This is enforced by the system at any amount, not merely as school policy — an attempt to approve your own request is refused outright. Make sure at least two people hold approve_refunds, or refunds will stall the first time your bursar is away.
Reversing a billing run
Where the run itself was wrong — billed against the wrong term, or built on a fee grid with a bad price — reverse the whole run with a reason, rather than issuing hundreds of credit notes.
Reversing is for systemic errors. For one pupil, use a credit note.
Everything is recorded
Credit notes, voids, refunds and reversals all record who did it, when, and the reason given. They appear in the audit log and are the first thing an auditor will ask to see.
Who can do this