Brightwheel's Bundled Sibling Payment feature simplifies billing for families with multiple children. Some key benefits include:
Parents can view balances for all children and make a single payment
Lowers processing fees for many schools and parents
More accurate reporting and invoicing for programs
Simplified billing plan setup
Easier day-to-day billing management on all sides
Continue reading to learn more about bundled sibling payments, the payment process, and available reporting.
Making a Bundled Payment Experience
To bill families with multiple children in the same family, we strongly recommend billing siblings separately by creating a individual billing plan for each child. This method is easiest for administrators to manage invoices and will result in clearer reporting and accounting.
Once individual plans have been created and payers are assigned to invoices for each sibling, families can pay all their invoices at once, in a bundled experience.
While payers will still receive individual invoices emailed to them for each child they are responsible for, if the invoices are paid all at once, the payer will only receive one emailed payment receipt and they will only pay a single processing fee. If autopay is enabled for multiple students on the same payment method with the same due date, these payments will automatically be bundled together as well.
It's important to note that while the payment experience is bundled, the payment itself will still be broken down and allocated to each respective student’s balance.
💡 To see the payer experience in greater detail, please review the payer-specific resource on Making a Payment for additional information.
The visuals above show what a payer will see from their account on the web and the app if they make a manual bundled payment.
Reporting
It's important to understand that bundled payments will always be “fully decomposed,” meaning that the total payment amount will be properly allocated to individual students at the time of the payment. There will never be a “hanging balance” on the payer’s account that was not applied to an individual student.
However, if you do want to see that two payments were “linked” or made at the same time, we recommend viewing the Payments & Credits report or the Deposits report, which will show a row for each individual payment and will include a list of all students included within that payment.