brightwheel's Attendance Billing tool allows programs to set up attendance charges in advance to quickly charge student accounts based on how long a student was in attendance - including part-time care, drop-in care, before/after care, early drop-off/late pick-up fees, and more! Charges can be assessed per minute, per hour, for half-days, or for full days.

Create Attendance Charges

From the Library in the Billing tab on the web portal, programs can create new Variable Charges for their attendance billing use cases.

Programs will enter a Charge Category, Description, Room(s) [can select one or all], Days of the Week, Rate, and Time. They can then click Save when all information is completed to add the new Variable Charge to the library. More than one Variable Charge can be created!

ℹ️ Updating a variable charge rule from the library at a later date will not affect charges that have already been processed

Process an Attendance Charge

With the Variable Charges created in the Library, programs can now bill students whose check-in / check-out records meet the criteria of the Variable Charges that were created.

To process Attendance Charges and bill students that have triggered these Charges:

On the At a Glance dashboard or Students tab, use the Select an action drop-down menu to select Process an attendance charge
Select the date range you want to process Attendance Charges for
ℹ️ You can only process charges for two weeks of attendance data at a time
Check the boxes for the charges you want to process and click Next
The Add students tab will surface all students that met the criteria of your charges in the time frame you selected:
1. Select the students you want to process charges for using the checkboxes
2. Edit the charge Total using the ✎ icon, if needed
  Please Note: If you do not see a student listed here, it’s because their check-in and check-out records did not match the Attendance Charge criteria you defined when creating the rule in the Library; this could be due to an error in their check-in or check out data. To fix attendance errors, see Fix Attendance Errors below. It is also possible that a single check-in and check-out record could trigger more than one of your Attendance Charge rules, so be sure to review all and process only the ones you want to.
Once you have reviewed all students and charges, click Next
Choose the due date and click Next
ℹ️ These charges will post immediately!
Review the charges and due date and when ready, click Create charges

By default, charges generated via attendance billing will be assigned to the primary payer and they cannot be allocated/split across multiple payers. Other payers that are not the primary will still see the invoices in their account and be able to pay them, it just will not appear in their current account balance. Once an attendance charge has been processed and applied to a student account for a given charge and time period, it cannot be processed again.

Fix Attendance Errors

If a student did not show up when processing Attendance Charges, it is likely because their check-in / check-out records did not match the criteria of the Attendance Charge rule you defined. This could be due to an error in their attendance data.

There are a few ways that Administrators can identify and fix attendance errors:

We highly recommend correcting errors from the student's profile feed on the web. This is the easiest process and will show you exactly what has or hasn't been logged for a given day. The Daily Attendance Report is also an option to leverage but this report will not capture all errors, which is why we recommend making corrections from the Student Activity Feed.

ℹ️ The Billing Only role cannot run attendance reports. Please reach out to a program Administrator to correct attendance discrepancies.

Modify Attendance Charges

If an attendance charge was scheduled to post Immediately, this charge cannot be modified. If there is a mistake on a charge sent immediately, programs should void the charge.

💡 The amount of an attendance charge cannot be edited from the pending charge, if the rate provided was incorrect, the charge should be deleted and then recreated to reflect an accurate amount.