Billing plans are the core of brightwheel billing, making it easy to automatically charge families for recurring services like monthly tuition or annual cleaning fees.

Admins can set up plans to bill on a regular schedule (E.g. weekly, annually, etc.), ensuring smooth and consistent payments.

What can be customized in a plan

You can set the billing plan name, payment due dates, invoice delivery preferences, and assign charges to specific payers and students, such as subsidy agencies or parents.

When setting up a billing plan, you can choose a recurring schedule:

Weekly
Bi-weekly (every other week)
Monthly, Bimonthly (1st & 15th), Bimonthly (15th & end of month)
Quarterly
Annually

With a bill plan, you can add and discount charges, split balances between payers, set start and end dates, control invoice timing, send Tuition Agreements, and issue one-time charges as needed.

Create billing plans

Once you create a billing plan, you can save it as a template to use reuse later. If you already have a template, you can select it when creating and assigning plans to students. Follow the steps to Create plans from saved templates to do so.

Log on the web
Click Billing in the sidebar
Press Select an action > Set up a billing plan
Choose students and enter charges. (Optional) Select Actions to assign payers, edit the amount, or apply a discount
Complete the remaining steps, then hit Create plan(s)

💡Tip: To understand what each field means when creating a billing plan, check out: What do the different fields mean when creating a billing plan?

Create a plan from saved templates

Once a billing plan template is created, or assigned to your location by a Multi-site Administrator, you can build billing plans from that template. This saves time by eliminating the need to recreate the plan for each new student.

Any plans created from a template won't alter the original template.

Note: If you can’t edit or delete a billing plan template, you may not have permission, or the template was created at the multi-site level. Please contact your program administrator directly for help.

Log on the web
Click Billing in the sidebar > Library
Next to the template, click Select an action > Set up a billing plan
Select Start from saved template to select the template
Continue through the remaining steps to create the plan

Apply discounts to billing plans

When creating a billing plan, you'll see the option to add discounts to a specific charge by checking the Discount? box. For detailed steps, visit Apply tuition discounts.

If only some families qualify for a discount, we recommend creating all billing plans first. Then edit the individual plans that need discounted rates. Visit Edit billing plans to learn how to add discounts to a plan that’s already created.

Split billing plans across multiple payers

If families want to split the cost of a student's charges, set up co-pays across multiple payers, or students have an alternate funding source that pays for their childcare costs (e.g. government subsidy agency), you can

create a billing plan shared across multiple payers.

The first step is to ensure each person is added as a contact and payer to the student's billing profile, then take steps to create the plan to split the charges:

Log in on the web > Go to Billing
Select a student, then Actions > Set up a billing plan
- If creating from scratch, turn on Assign charge to specific payer(s) once the charge is selected
- If creating from a saved template, click Actions > Assign payers in the charge row
Set the amounts for each payer and save
Complete the remaining steps, then Create plan(s)

Note: Discounts must be added before splitting the charge and they'll be applied proportionally based on the subtotals due for each payer.

FAQs

How do split payments appear for families and agencies?

If you split charges, the family payers will all receive notifications of charges based on the porton they're responsible for. Agencies cannot pay directly through brightwheel, so you'll need to take steps to manually log payments made by agencies and apply the payment against any invoices.

FAQs

How do I set up billing plans for siblings?

You can simply create a separate billing plan for each sibling and then parents will have the option to pay the total balance for both student's in their account. Learn more about billing siblings here.

What do the different fields mean when creating a billing plan?

Plan name: Describes the plan, this will be visible to you but will not be seen by your families.
First payment due date: Sets when the first payment for the plan is due.
Last payment due date [Optional]: This is the last date a charge will be due, and the plan will expire on this selected date. If no last payment date is selected, the plan will repeat until you manually pause or delete it
When should payers receive invoices? This is the timing of when invoices should be sent to families before their payment is due - this gives families an opportunity to review their charges before paying. For example, you may want invoices to go out 5 days before payment is due.
Dates of service [Optional]: Shows families the time period that payers are being charged for, relative to the billing period and your first billing period date. While an optional field, we highly recommend setting a billing period so that families can reference the dates for taxes or applying for reimbursement for childcare. These dates are just for reference and do not impact the frequency of the plan.
Notes: This will show up on each invoice for payers to see

Can I add dates of service to a plan retroactively?

Once you create a billing plan, you can't edit the plan to add dates of service after it has been posted. As a workaround to this, you can edit the notes section of the plan to add the dates of service there, or you can delete the billing plan and create a new one with the dates of service added.

Can I create a plan directly from a child's billing profile?

Yes! On most pages within brightwheel, such as a student's billing profile, you'll conveniently see the Select an action button at the top of the page, which can be clicked to create a billing plan.