Working with Fees and Discounts

Working with Fees and Discounts

There are many different ways to configure fees in Martial Class™ In fact, the handling of fees and contracts in Martial Class™ is one of it's most advanced capabilities. The way you configure your system will be guided by whether or not you use contracts, if you charge yearly subscriptions or fees, and many other factors.

Here we will discuss the various fee and contract related concepts handled by Martial Class™ in order to explain the different mechanisms available to you and how they can be used.

Fee Items

Fee Items need to exist for any billing you perform. In some instances you may have a fee for yearly membership, a fee for monthly training, a floor fee, or an hourly fee. You may also have locker rental fees, or fees for replacement of lost membership books, and you may have contracts that charge periodic fees.

To set up and maintain fee items, you use the controls available from the Items Window.

Fees that are configured in the system in this way are not automatically applied to students unless they are:

Included in a contract (recurrent billing for training agreements),

Added to a classtime configuration (for class-based fees), or

In a package (billing based on a person's attendance in some period).

But you can drag and drop fees directly from the Items Window at any time to charge an ad-hoc fee.

Per Class fees

Martial Class™ can be configured to charge a single fee to each student who attends a particular class. You can use this for a flat $5 floor fee for instance, or just an additional fee for a particular class, such as to cover materials or training equipment. To do this, you create a fee in the items window that has the setting "per class" and when you create the class you specify that fee in the class time editor window.

Packages

Fees that are configured in the system are not automatically applied to anything unless they are included in a contract (recurrant billing for training agreements), a classtime configuration (for class-based fees), or in a package (billing based on a person's attendance in some period).

To have a fee charged to a person only if they turn up and train in a given period (ie: many schools charge a monthly fee based on if the student trains in that month), then you would use a package for this type of fee.

A package, however, can contain several fees for several different periods. If, for instance, your school had a monthly fee and a yearly membership that must both be current for the student to be training, then you would add a yearly fee and a monthly fee to a package, then assign that package to the student in the student details window (bearing in mind that each student may only be aassigned a single package).

You can also override the default fee amount in a package so that a Monthly fee for an Adult may cost $15 more than for a Student or Child. See the help system for more details.

Fee Discounts

Some schools may offer a discount off a monthly fee for additional members in a family. To do this in Martial Class™ you configure the fee and add it to a package as above, and then you create a Fee Discount for it using the Family Discounts tab on the Fees, Discounts and Contract Types Window:

In this example, the first student will get no rebate on their monthly fee, but the second student to be charged that fee in that month will receive a $10 discount (but will not pay less than $80).

The third student will receive $15 off their monthly fee and the fourth will receive $20 off. Furthermore, if the total of all four students is greater than $110, then the final fee will only be the difference to make the total paid by all family members equal to $110.

These discounts can also be applied to contract payments and per-class fees.