Attendance Billing

[For Admins] Learn how to create and process attendance charges to charge student accounts based on their check-in records

Sabrina avatar
Written by Sabrina
Updated over a week ago

brightwheel's Attendance Billing tool allows administrators 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, Admins can create new Variable Charges for their attendance billing use cases.

Admins 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. Admins can create more than one Variable Charge.

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


Process Attendance Charges

With the Variable Charges created in the Library, Administrators 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:

  1. On the At a Glance dashboard or Students tab, use the Select an Action drop-down menu to select Process an Attendance Charge

  2. Select the date range you want to process Attendance Charges for
    Please Note: You can only process charges for two weeks of attendance data at a time

  3. Check the boxes for the charges you want to process and click Review students

  4. The Review Students screen 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

    2. Edit the Total Amount by pressing the pencil 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.

  5. Once you have reviewed all charges, click Schedule

  6. Choose the due date
    Please Note: these charges will post immediately!

  7. Click Review and then Create

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.

Please Note: Multiple Payers is a feature rolling out to users on our newest billing platform over the coming weeks. If you do not have these options available to you yet, please be aware you will soon!


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.


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, an Administrator should void the charge.

If an attendance charge was added to the next Invoice, then the charge can be deleted up until the Invoice posts. These charges will be added to the Pending charges section of the student’s billing account. Simply click the pencil icon to edit the charge.

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

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