Most childcare centers receive subsidy payments from state, federal, and/or local agencies. Managing these invoices and payments requires a fully different set of tools and features than managing invoices and payments from a student’s family. However, at the end of the day, agency payments affect a school’s income and revenue similarly.
Brightwheel now offers a brand new Subsidies payment management tool that helps administrators simplify managing their agency payments by giving them a complete picture of agency invoices, balances, and payments right from within brightwheel billing. Subsidies will be fully integrated with bill plans, student profiles, and reports.
This improved Subsidies experience enables Administrators to:
Add Agencies as payers for students individually or in bulk.
Create bill plans for agencies or one-time charges as needed.
Log agency payments more easily.
Filter student profiles and billing reports for agency invoices and payments.
Subsidies Dashboard
Click to open the Billing page on the purple sidebar menu and jump to the Subsidies tab. On this page, you will see a list of all existing agencies and the ability to Add agency.
The list will include the following information for each individual agency:
Agency: the name of the agency
Students: the number of students with the agency attached as a payer
Open Invoices: # of invoices that are posted but not Paid and are assigned to the agency
Unpaid: any unpaid open invoices owed by the agency
Available Payments: sum of all payments (and partial payments) that have been logged on behalf of the agency but not yet applied to an invoice
Balance: $ Delta between unpaid and available
Actions menu: allows you to select View account and view recent transactions, upcoming invoices, and agency information
Agency Summary
By clicking an agency from within the list, you will be able to view the agency's profile in more detail and view their balance across all students they're attached to.
Transactions tab: will show the balance across any students the agency is attached to
Upcoming invoices tab: will show all upcoming invoices posting soon for any students the agency is attached to
Agency info tab: contains the agency's contact information added during the initial creation. This can easily be edited by clicking Edit from this tab at any time.
Invoices tab: will show posted invoices and allow the ability to Log a Payment, View/Edit, Bill Another Payer, Waive, or Void right from the agency summary
Payments tab: will show all logged payments the agency has made for any students they are attached to
Students tab: View students already associated with an agency and if they are currently on a Bill plan, add new students individually/in bulk to the agency, and edit the agencies info
Payer Type
In this improved experience, agencies can be added as payers to a student's billing account, much like a parent or family member can be. Therefore, a new concept introduced in this experience is the ability to view information on student billing profiles and in reports by filtering for the 'Payer type'. The types of payers are as follows:
Private Payers: any payer attached to a student contact, such as a parent, family member, etc., that is not an agency-payer
Agency Payers: any agencies added as a payer, attached to a student's billing profile
All payers: a combination of both Private and Agency Payers
Subsidy Billing Options
In this new experience, there are three options to log and track subsidy payments depending on your program's needs.
Billing Plans
This is our suggested recommendation for tracking subsidy payments. You can either create a separate bill plan just for the agency or create a holistic bill plan that splits charges across families and agencies. Bill plans will function largely the same way for agencies as they do for private payers, except for the fact that when invoices post, there will not be an email or text sent.
One-time Charges
One-time charges are a helpful way to record one-off agency charges for subsidies that may not recur on a regular frequency. Creating a one-time charge will generate an invoice. You can then log payments against that invoice.
If you receive an amount lower than you expected from the agency but still expect to be paid for the charge, you can log a payment against the agency invoice, then bill the remainder to the family.
Logging a Payment without a Bill Plan or Invoice
Logging a payment without a bill plan/invoice is an option if you want to record an agency payment quickly and aren’t looking for full tracking of money owed by agencies. Note: you can still go back and create an invoice after the fact!
Reporting
You can easily pull reporting at any time for a specific agency, student, or program as a whole. There is a new Payer type filter option in the following reports that will allow you to filter the report results by Private payers, Agency payers, or All payers.
Additional Subsidies Resources
Review our Getting Started with Subsidies resource that overviews all the steps you need to take in one place, or review our stand-alone resources on Adding an Agency, Logging Subsidy Payments, and Deleting an Agency.