Brightwheel provides student contacts with parent-level permissions with the simplest payment experience in early childhood education. Brightwheel makes it easy for parent contacts to quickly see what and why they’re being charged and make a payment in just a couple of clicks. With an easy-to-understand statement, similar to your phone, cable, or utility bills - brightwheel’s statements show in one quick view the previous balance, all activity including charges and payments, the resulting new balance, and the due date.
Brightwheel puts families in control. Each parent contact can change their payment methods whenever needed instead of having to submit paperwork to the provider. Parent contacts can initiate a payment for any amount - both less than or greater than the current balance at any time. They can also easily print statements or all of their account activity between specified dates for reimbursement purposes. This can even be done from the brightwheel mobile app!
Download our Parent Setup Guide for more insight into the brightwheel billing platform!
Table of Contents
Student Accounts
The student’s billing account page will be the go-to for all things billing-related. This is where parent contacts will have the ability to view the amount owed to the school, current and past statements, and all historical billing records. To find this page, log into brightwheel online and click on Payments from the side menu or tap the three lines on your mobile app and tap Payments.
Included on the Student Billing Account page:
Make a Payment: The Make a Payment button is displayed in the upper right-hand corner, if there is not a payment method on file, clicking this button will allow the addition of a new payment method prior to completing the payment flow.
Total Balance Due: This is the blue box that contains the sum of all the account’s past activity and represents the amount that is currently owed to the school including any past due balances (if the parent contact has already paid more than what the balance owed the school, this box will turn green and display the total account credit).
Total Past Due: This is the sum of charges that are past due. If nothing is past due, this box will be gray and display a $0.00 balance. Once a balance is determined past due, it will display red with that sum.
Most Recent Statement: The most recent statement posted to a student’s account will display at the top near the balance for quick viewing access.
Posted Transactions: These are all of the transactions that have occurred on the student's account. Transactions that would be visible here include payments, credits, and refunds which always post immediately to the student’s account.
Select an Action: This drop-down allows the parent contact to View all statements, which provides a list of all statements created for the student and are available for you to view, download, or print. Or, Export summary which provides a summary of all transactions by date range that includes charges, payments, dates, and School EIN & address for tax purposes.
If there have not yet been any statements from the school for a student, their account will display $0 for the balance due and past due along with an empty Statements table. Parent contacts will still be able to make a payment if the provider has enabled online payments. Making a payment would result in a positive current balance, or Credit, showing that the student has paid more than what is currently owed to the school.
Posted Transactions
Parent contacts have the ability to see all of the account activity consolidated in one view using the Posted Transactions table. In addition to statement PDFs, this table can be used to view and generate the reports that may be needed for reimbursement purposes. Parent contacts can filter by start and end date to see all of the activity for a particular date range.
This table contains the following activity types:
Charges: These are the line items that the school has charged to the student account. The format for these will be Category: Description.
Payments: Any payments made will show up here, including online payments made through brightwheel or offline payments entered by school administrators. The format for these will be Payment: Payment Method or Offline Payment: Payment Method.
To make this view as useful as possible, it can be filtered, printed, and/or exported at any time with the following options:
Date Filters: Select a posted date range over which to see all of the account’s activity; choosing a beginning date will show all activity since that date, choosing an end date will show all activity prior to that date, choosing both will display all activity that took place between those dates.
Transaction Type Filter: Quickly see all of the transactions of a certain type - for example, filtering to see all of the payments that have been made or all of the charges that have been posted.
