Name: Setting Up the New School Year with Blackbaud Tuition Management™
Uploaded: 2026-10-14T19:32:06.568Z
Duration: 57 min 36 s
Description: Setting Up the New School Year with Blackbaud Tuition Management™

Transcript for "Setting Up the New School Year with Blackbaud Tuition Management™": Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us here today. We are gonna go over some tips and best practices, regarding new school year setup for Black Law Tuition Management, as we very quickly approach setting up for the 2728 school year. I don't particularly wanna think about time passing that fast, but, it's here whether we like it or not. So before we begin, we're just gonna go over a few webinar housekeeping items. So first, you'll receive a link to this webinar recording by email after everything is concluded. So if you do miss anything, you will have a chance to review it again later. You can download the slides for today's presentation, via the docs tab on the right hand side of your screen. If you just click on them, that will initiate a download for you. Audio for this webinar is broadcast through your computer speakers. If you are having any technical issues, refreshing your browser tends to resolve those. You can use the Q and A section also on the right hand side of your screen, to submit questions during the course of the webinar. We have John, Aaron, and Annie from our tuition management team, here to help answer questions during the course of things. You can use the cogwheel on your screen to adjust the settings for the webinar as well. Let's take a quick look at today's agenda. Here's some of what we'll be covering. We're gonna start with new features, including refunds, balance and credit rollovers, and truth and lending statements. Then we're gonna move on to where to find those, updates as they come out as, we release new items. From there we'll move on to opening the new school year and what settings roll over with the new school year, which we have a list of there. We'll go into detail here later. We'll go into what settings can't be changed once the school year, is kind of in progress. And then we, we'll finish off with some, considerations if you are using the enrollment management integrated contracts to enroll your students and families into tuition management. I am Jacques Negre. I have been with Blackbaud for about eight years now, and I've been using tuition management that entire time. If you have ever contacted support or, needed help in tuition management, there's a real good chance that we have crossed paths at some point or another. I am located in Southern Virginia, and I moved up here from Charleston, which is where I started working for Blackbaud. First, I'd like to start, with new features that have been added since we started prepping for the previous school year. So just kinda some of the big ticket items that were added to, to the system, since the 2627 school year got going. I am gonna start with my favorite new feature and that is refunds. If you ask me, that's one of the more exciting updates we've had in a while, definitely often requested. And if you're familiar with the old refund process, you know that that could be a little cumbersome. So, to go into a little more detail, school finance users can now return payments to families directly via tuition management. This gives schools a faster way to issue refunds, keep account balances accurate, and refunds back to the original payment method. Now how do you initiate a, school refund in the system? So, to initiate a refund, you're going to file... Pull up your, the family in question, whether that's through manage families or just bringing up their family ID directly, however, however works best for you. So we're gonna click on that family, open the account, and sit on their main family landing page, which is the one that's gonna show, that kind of overview of the charges and payments and all that fun stuff. From a family's main landing page, under billing summary, locate the payment and select the amount under the settled column. To open it, you can just click on the payment from that main landing page, and it'll bring up a pop up window. If the payment is eligible for refund you will see an orange refund button in the bottom right corner of that window. Select refund payments and that is that is it. Mechanically, the process is very straightforward, and then we'll, you know, we'll cover here in a second kind of what happens on the back end. But, as far as the actual process of initiating the refund, it's as straightforward as that. Just locate the payment on the family's main landing page, click the refund button, and that's all you need to do. Tuition management excludes the refunded amount from the school's next remittance. While the refund is in progress, the payment status will show as refund requested. So we have, our usual payment statuses of in process, success, settled, refund payment will be, the status of the payment, or refund request will be the status of that payment while, we're waiting for it to process. After processing, the payment status updates to failed and the system returns the funds to the original payment method. There's a few eligibility requirements that must be met prior to refunding a payment. First, you'll need to be a school finance user, to see the refund option. So that is a user role that is associated with your account in tuition management. You can have one or multiple school finance users for the school. If you need to see what roles folks have or if you need to make updates to those, you can navigate to settings and manage accounts in tuition management. If no users have the school finance user role, you can update someone to have that role at which point they will have access to the refund feature. The school must also have sufficient funds available for remittance. For example, a payment of a thousand dollars cannot be refunded if only $500 is in process for remittance. To review pending remittances, see the remittances tile on the tuition management main landing page for the school. So that'll be the first page you see upon logging in. And all it's really saying is that we can't we can't send back money we don't have. Generally, it has not been too much of a problem in my experience so far. Refunds do cover the full payment amount. Currently, we do not support partial refunds. So in this case, it's kind of an all or nothing. The entire payment amount needs to be refunded, and worth noting that when that refund does occur, any platform fees associated with the payment are also refunded to families as well. So it is a full refund, including the payment itself and any platform fees associated with it. The payment will also need to be in a status of settled, which indicates that those funds have been remitted to the school. So any of the other payment statuses, in process, success, you won't see the refund option. It's not until the funds are remitted and the payment moves to that settled status, that you'll see the refund option. And the settled status is also a separate column, on the family main landing page. So if you don't see the payment in there, then you can't refund it just yet. The payment you're attempting to refund needs to have been submitted within the past ninety days. Payments older than that, if you're looking to refund, you will have to use the old method, as the refund option won't be available. For bank account payments, the ACH payments, seven days need to have passed since the original payment date. The payment method must be a credit card, debit card, or bank account. Tuition management does not support refunds for mailed checks, money orders, Flywire, PayNearMe, or other alternative payment methods, similar to the payments that are older than ninety days. If you run into a situation where one of those payments needs to be refunded, you would need to use the old refund process. And if you want details on that, you can re... Search our knowledge base, which has the whole process step by step for issuing a refund for those situations. The payment must have been submitted electronically through phone, web, automatic debit, and enrollment deposit contract, shopping cart, or buy now, give now. So really just just another way of saying that they must have been made directly through tuition management, electronically. So the family submitted the payment, via the parent website, auto draft, what have you. The school account needs to be active and in good standing, which really kind of dovetails into the next the next, item is that the school's not started the process of canceling tuition management. So, if you have begun the process of canceling tuition management, then you wouldn't see the refund option. Otherwise, you should be generally good to go. If a payment doesn't meet those conditions, any one of those, the refund payment option will not be available. You will not see it, on any of your payments. And in my experience so far, like I said, it's a fairly new feature still. Not being the school finance user is the biggest reason I see folks not seeing, that refund button. So, once you've got a finance user, generally speaking, you should be seeing that option on payments that are eligible for it. So another item we added during the course of the last school year are, balance and credit rollovers. So tuition management now has a built in tool to roll over family credits and balances to the new school year in batch. To move balances, a discount must be set up in the year balances are being moved from and marked as the balance rollover discount via the item settings. You can see in the screenshots here that the toggle for for that is located just above the general billing item settings. When setting up a new fee or discount, you'll just see a a button is a balance or is a credit rollover, yes or no, and that's what designates which fee or discount is used for these. In the year the balances are being moved to so if you're moving balances to $27.28 for example once that's set up and ready a fee needs to be set up and marked as the balance rollover fee. Once those billing items have been set up and the desired distribution settings chosen, the balance rollover procedure can be formed... Be performed. And for distribution settings, that's simply gonna be whether you want it to be billed to the first month across tuition months, specific months, that kind of thing. Now to start the actual process of moving those balances, in the year, the balances are being moved from navigate to families and manage families. If you're familiar with the process of doing things in dash under manage families, this will all seem pretty familiar. So you're gonna select the account whose balances you'd like to move to the new year, and you're gonna do that, by clicking the check mark next to the family names. Like other processes in tuition management, this is a per page process. So if you have multiple pages of results that you're gonna be doing this for, you're gonna be doing it for each page. So once you've got your family selected, you can click the select action button and choose balance rollover from the drop down list. And here on the right of this slide you can see, from that select action menu where there is the balance rollover option. Once you select that, you will get a pop up that allows you to select which billing items are going to be used for the rollover process. Now this will be the discount you you set up, to move balances out of the current year and then the fee you set up to move, balances to the next year. Once you've got those items selected, click submit, and the system will process those balance rollovers. And once it's done, you should see those balances updated on the family accounts in both school years. One item to note is that the balance and credit rollovers do not move unpaid blackbaud fees such as the admin fee or late fees. So if you do have unpaid late fees or admin fees, things of that nature, those will not roll over and would need to be addressed separately. Credits can be rolled over as well. The process for credit rollovers is virtually identical to the balance rollover process with a couple of minor differences. Instead of creating a discount in the year the credit is being moved from, you will set up a fee. And in the year that the credit is being moved to, you will set up a discount. The only other difference in the process for moving the credits is that in manage families under select action button, you'll select credit balance rollover, as opposed to balance rollover. That is definitely another super handy one as we get going in the new school year. Makes that process a whole lot quicker. The last new feature I really wanted to touch on, that we introduced during the last school year are truth in lending statements. In the past, you had to reach out to our support team to make a special request to have them generated. There was usually some some lead time on that. It could take a couple days, and then you had to manually disseminate those truth in lending statements, yourself. So the new truth in lending statement process, pretty much gets rid of all of that. So truth and lending statements can now be set up in tuition management and displayed to families via the tuition management parent website. To enable truth and lending statements, navigate to settings and manage truth and lending statements. You'll be brought to the page that's on the right hand side of this slide and that page is gonna allow you to choose which billing items should be included in the statements. You can select any fees that should be included as finance fees, select whether the tuition management admin fee should be included as part of those calculations, and then finally select the option to display the truth in lending statements on the Parent website. Once that's enabled and you've chosen to display them on the parent website, families will see the option to generate the truth and lending statements, via the parent portal. You can see it in this screenshot. It's just below the school year drop down menu, to the right of their current balances. Families can click on that and it will generate their their truth in lending statement, and then you're done with that process. So real quick, the... All of this information as these new features are released, we do post that, to our what's new page. And it's not just these product updates, but any product updates. They don't necessarily have to be a big new feature. You can you can see kind of what's new through the system. When new features or updates are released, they're posted to that what's new page. These updates are released weekly, though there won't necessarily be updates every week. So, you might find the tuition management section blank on the occasional week if there weren't any big updates. So to find this page within tuition management, click on the help button and in the help menu menu click help again. That will take you to the tuition management help center, which you can see on the left here. Once you're in there, click on the what's new tile and that page will show the latest updates for multiple Blackbaud solutions including tuition management. Now it's always gonna be, defaulted to the current week. If you wanted to see something maybe, that was released several weeks ago, you can use the left... The menu on the left side of the page, to view updates from prior weeks, and it's just labeled I think prior updates. So if you click on that, you can see, previous weeks as as to what's been added or updated in tuition management. Alright. Now that we've covered some of the bigger updates that happened last year, let's take a look at getting the new school year set up in tuition management itself. So we will start by opening the new school year. Now previously, this process was an internal process on the Blackbaud side, and we opened up the school year for everybody at the same time. You may remember seeing that pop up in in September in previous years, just kind of out of the blue. As of, I think, last school year, schools are now able to open the new school year, at their convenience. There's no set time frame for opening the new year aside from being ready for your school to accept enrollments for the new year. So if you don't see the need to open up the new school year until February, because that's when you get started working in the new school year, you can absolutely open it up then. There's no no necessary... Necessarily no rush to, to get things started. Now to open up the new school year, you can navigate to settings and manage school years within tuition management. There will be a blue button that you can see on this slide, that says create new 2728 school year in this case. Go ahead and click on that. You will get a pop up window, just kinda going over that that it's gonna take a few minutes and, you're opening up the new school year. So click confirm when that window pops up to actually start the process of opening the new year. And if you don't see the new school year in your school year drop down menu within a few minutes, you can refresh your page. If that doesn't do it, logging out and back in will do the trick. But generally speaking, within within a couple of minutes, you should see the new school year available to work in. If you're still having trouble after, you know, fifteen or twenty minutes and it's still not showing no no matter what you do, you can reach out to our support team and we can take a look. But, yeah, you should see that really quick. Now, let's take a look at what rolls over when the new school year is opened. What settings rollover when you do click that button to open the new school year? This is a one time rollover, and it occurs when that new school year is opened. Once the new year has been opened, any additional setting changes need to be applied separately to both school years if if applicable. So, when we open the new school year, all this to us rolls over and after that, if you say set up a new payment plan in 2627, you would also need to manually have it set up in '27, '28 after that rollover has occurred. But if you do it before the rollover, then everything will just automatically rollover. So some of the items that rollover when New Year's opened are payment plans, parent enrollment option settings, due dates, your billing items at the school level, not at the family level, but at the school level, so the ones you would see in manage fees and discounts, late fee settings, grade levels, invoice settings, and saved custom reports among other items. Now we are gonna go a little bit deeper into each of those here as there are several things you need to be aware of just at the start of the school year to make sure everything goes smoothly. We'll start with payment plans as that's probably one of the the the bigger ticket items, to make sure that is is ready to go once that new school year is open and you're starting to accept enrollments. So payment plans will automatically roll over from the previous school year. This view... Rollover occurs, as I mentioned, when the new school year is opened. If plan months were changed between school years and you will be manually reenrolling families via tuition management. So, the manual rollover process means you're not using integrated contracts, you're not having families enroll via the tuition management enrollment website, that you are moving them from reenrolled families, to pending families or to active, yourself. So if you are manually reenrolling families, please reach out to the tuition management support team as, and and... I'm sorry. Let me start over. If you're manually reenrolling families, and you made changes to payment plans during the previous school year, you'll wanna reach out to tuition management support team, as we may need to tweak those plans a little bit, revert them to their original settings, before you roll over those families. For example, if you have an annual payment plan with the billing month of November in the 2627 school year, but need to update it to December for 2728, you... Or updated it during the course of the 2627 school year even. We'll wanna make sure that that payment plan says November when it rolls over when you roll those families over. Reason being that if the plan settings don't match across school years, the system sees them as different payment plans, and this will cause families to default to the payment plan with the most available tuition months. So, if payment plan settings don't match year to year and families are rolled over, they could roll over to the wrong payment plan for the new school year, which can be cleaned up before completing enrollment, but definitely adds an extra step. So for those reasons, we recommend having, reaching out to the tuition management support team to have your payment plans reviewed if you made any changes to them during the course of the previous school year. And again, this is specific to manually reenrolling families. A couple of other items to consider, on the payment plan front. Do you have plans set up to accommodate the building sessions you need such as annual, semi annual, monthly, etcetera? The beginning of the school year is definitely the best time to get your your plan set up, put together the way you like. If you'll be accepting enrollments later in, we can edit existing payment plans as the year progresses to allow for enrollments throughout the school year. For example, we can edit an annual July plan to have August open as a tuition month. Once August is over, we can update it to September and so on. The same can be done for semi annual, quarterly, or any other payment plans you have as needed. These updates are not retroactive, so if you're opening additional months, it won't affect families who have previously enrolled, and is especially useful for enrollment management integrated contracts because it allows you to use the same payment plan and keep it viable throughout the school year. If editing existing payment plans, no changes need to be made to the contract. Those things will will flow over there automatically. And to kinda harp on my point from the previous slides, if you do go this route and are manually reenrolling families, you definitely should have your payment plans reviewed, at the beginning of the new school year. The alternative to editing the existing plans is to create separate payment plans for each billing situation. For example, you would have an annual August payment plan and then a separate annual September plan, annual October, you know, whatever payment plans that that you would need throughout the school year. If you were adding new payment plans, separate payment plans for these situations, and using enrollment management integrated contracts, you would, in this case, need to add to the new plans to the contracts as needed. The plans would be available to use on contracts after completing the tuition management portion, but wouldn't automatically populate on contracts. So you would need to add those, payment plans to the contracts as the old ones expire. To have edits made to payment plans or new payment plans created or old payment plans removed, you can reach out to the tuition management support team. On the subject of payment plans, if you find yourself needing to extend payment plans to add additional months throughout the school year, you may want to consider adding those months to payment plans for the upcoming year. Having extra months already available can prevent needing to extend payment plans throughout the school year. And we'll just cover really quick, you know, what what kind of effects extending will have versus just having the months on the plan to begin with. So keep in mind before extending a payment plan to add additional months, extending payment plans updates the payment plan name to special payment plan for any families whose plans are extended. So it won't won't do it for everybody, just just the folks whose plans you are extending, but it will update that payment plan name to special payment plan. Extending payment plans may also affect the admin fee charge or display depending on your school's setup. One of the more common ones is if a family is on a single pay plan, something that has say only August available for all billing and it's extended to include September, it is no longer a single month payment plan. So instead of being subject to the $22 admin rate, it would then be subject to the $56 admin rate. So definitely a couple of things you wanna keep in mind, before extending payment plans, and a couple of reasons that adding those extra months at the tail end of your payment plans might work better, than not having them on there. So at the beginning of the year, if you find that in the previous year you were extending a lot of payment plans, it might be useful to add those months to the payment plans for the next school year. Alright. The next one is a big one. It is the parent enrollment option settings for tuition management. Now previously, these settings were only able to be edited by reaching out to our support team. But a little bit ago, we opened these settings up to the school side as well, which is great because they are very powerful settings as far as the enrollment process goes, especially if you are using integrated contracts or if you have families enrolling through the tuition management enrollment website. Payment plans, due dates, and payment methods visible to families are what can be adjusted through those parent enrollment options settings. This page affects which plans, due dates, and payment methods are visible to families through enrollment management integrated contracts or via tuition management enrollment website at enroll.blackbaud.school. You can find these, these settings by navigating to settings and manage school settings in tuition management. From there, select parent enrollment options from the enrollment settings section on the left side menu. On the right hand side, that'll pop up a couple options. One of them is payment plans. Click the edit button at the bottom of the payment plan section on that page and that will bring up the parent enrollment options which will look like the bottom part, the bottom screenshot on this slide here. So on that page, items with check marks will be visible to families during the enrollment process. Items without check marks are available for school use but not visible to families during enrollment. So essentially, if something on the parent enrollment options page is not check marked, it is for school use only. If it is check marked, then that's something that families are gonna be able to see, or use during the enrollment process. So if, for example, you wanted to open up some additional due dates for a family, you could come on to this page and add those due dates. If you wanted to add a different payment method, in this case, we're we're using automatic versus manual payments, you can enable and disable those options as well. And you can have different due date options available between them too. So, if you want your automatic families to have options of the tenth and twentieth, but you want your manual paying families to have a due date of the first of the month, you could configure that here. If you are using enrollment management integrated contracts, these settings will automatically flow over to the contract side. So once you update them, and save them in tuition management, families should then see those additional due date or payment method options over on the contract side when they go to complete their contracts. Due dates, also roll over from the previous year. Available due dates and due date settings found under settings and parent enrollment options automatically roll over. Add it to payment plans, methods, and due date visibility, for families during enrollment can be made via that parent enrollment options page. Now the due date availability and individual family due dates can be updated throughout the year. If the due date for a family has passed for a month, updating the due date will not result in a second autograph attempt. So if you have a family who who didn't have a payment method set up or for whatever reason missed, an automatic draft date, setting the payment date for later in the month will not result in a reattempt of that draft. The due date change actually won't take effect for the current month if you are, trying to change it after the due date has passed. Instead, it'll be effective for the next billing month. If you're looking to trim down your due date selection, due dates cannot be removed if in use by any accounts, though you can still edit their availability during the enrollment process via the parent enrollment option settings. So if you wanted to totally remove a due date of, say, the thirtieth from options for the school, all families would need to be using a different due date. If any families are on that thirtieth due date, we wouldn't be able to remove that option. Due dates cannot be... Sorry. Due date updates cannot be made in bulk, once accounts are active. So for active accounts, due date changes need to be completed on an individual account level. There's not a way to batch update family due dates, once the accounts are made active. Now if the accounts are in the pending families folder, you know, for whatever reason, if you have the don't take a deposit and the families land there, or if you're manually reenrolling families, you'll find the families will end up in the pending families folder. Now in pending families, due dates can be updated in batch. So if you do need to make batch updates, try to catch those families before the accounts are made active. That way you can do them all at once rather than each account at a time. So now let's take a look at, billing items via the manage fees and discounts page. Billing items will automatically roll over when the new school year is opened. And again this is this is on the school level. So these are the items that you have created and accessed through manage fees and discounts. This is not referring to each family's individual billing. Family billing does not rollovers year to year, just the billing items themselves. Any amounts you have entered for billing items will also rollover at this time. So if you have, say, a tuition fee in the amount of $1,000 in 2627, it's gonna roll over to 2728 also at $1,000. For that reason, it's important to review the billing item amounts in manage fees and discounts after the new school year, is opened. That way, if any changes have been made to your rates, you can update them in tuition management as well. Tuition fees, if you're using those, are definitely one of the bigger items that get updated year to year, so that's a good one to review if you're using those. It is also important to review billing item distribution settings if they were modified during the previous school year or if they're just be... They'll be just be billed in different months for the new school year. Distribution settings, like the payment plans, can be modified throughout the school year without affecting billing for existing families. Again, distribution settings here is gonna be whether it's billed to the first month, across tuition months, to specific months, etcetera. If you need to open up distribution settings to accommodate different billing situations for families, for example, you can update an item from first month distribution to across tuition amounts without affecting families it's already been applied to. So you can modify those settings. It won't affect families who have already been billed, only those, you're billing moving forward. So if you need to make updates, even if it's just selecting different months under the specific month's distribution, you can do that without affecting current families, and only applying to billing situations moving forward. Once a billing item has been applied to a student or family, you are not able to adjust whether it is student or family based. So if you need to make updates to whether your items are student or family based, it is it is important to do that before applying that to any families. If you do and it needs to be updated after the fact, you can generally remove the item and create a a new billing item and make that one either student or family based, but heading that off by having it corrected, before applying it is definitely gonna be, the cleanest way to do things. To create, remove, or make edits to the enrollment fee types, please reach out to tuition management support. Now if you're working in tuition management under manage fees and discounts, you'll see a tab for enrollment fees but you won't actually be able to add or modify those yourself. The enrollment fees are due at the time of enrollment if families are enrolling via the tuition management enrollment website or enrollment management integrated contracts. So fees set up under the enrollment fee type are gonna be due before the family is able to complete the enrollment process. So payments will be taken for those, during that process whether it's the contract or the enrollment website, and will flow over to tuition management with the account once that's created. Next, we'll take a look at late fee settings. Late fee settings do allow for a fair amount of customization in several ways. So if if you're new to tuition management or you've never adjusted your late fee settings, we have a few ways that we can customize those for your school. The first of those is going to be, the grace period for late fees. So the grace period dictates how many days after the due date a late fee is applied if there's a past due balance. The late fee grace period can be set to between one and thirty days so we can have late fees apply right away or if, you want to give families a couple of weeks to to settle things out before late fee applies, we can adjust those as well. The late fee threshold controls at what past due balance amount late fees will apply. So, for example, the default late fee threshold is $40. If the past due balance is $40 or more after the grace period ends under those settings, a late fee will be applied. The late fee threshold can be updated to be from 1 to $2,000. So, there's a fair amount of wiggle room there that you can give families, so they can have some past due balance but not enough of one to trigger a late fee. We can also, include or exclude specific billing items from late fee calculations. So if you only, for example, wanted late fees to be based on tuition, we can set it up so that only tuition is eligible for late fees. If needed, we can also disable late fees for specific months. I know some schools like to have the first month as kind of a getting to know things period where late fees don't apply, so that is also something we're able to accommodate. If you do need to make updates to any of your late fee settings, please reach out to the tuition management support team and they can get that process started for you. Now on the school side, late fees can also be disabled on the family level for specific months or for the entire school year if needed. These updates can be made by the school with no need to reach out to our support team. Let's take a quick look at that process. From a family's account, open up the navigation panel on the left hand side of the screen. Click on more options and then review follow-up is the page that we're gonna be working in. The buttons on the top of that page, you can see them here in the screenshot, control these settings for the entire school year and the buttons next to the individual months allow you to customize it to only specific months. So if you have a family, who shouldn't be eligible for late fees at all, you can use those top buttons to disable them, for the entire school year. Or if maybe there's only specific months you want them to to not have to worry about, you can use the individual month buttons, to disable them for for specific billing months. Now once you're done with that, there's a save changes button at the bottom of the screen. Just click on that and that'll do the trick. On this page, just to kinda to go over what these these represent, the follow-up fee is the Blackbaud late fee. So that's the the $40 that families are charged from Blackbaud. The school late fee is the school late fee portion, if you have any any late fees get out... Set up for the school side. You can enable or disable these late fees separately via this page. So if you wanted a family to be eligible for school late fees but not Blackbaud bod late fees or the other way around, we can accommodate those situations. One thing worth noting is that disabling the black bod late fee also disables the follow-up service associated with the late fees. So the follow-up service includes items such as our past due, emails and texts. If late fees are disabled, that will also disable the follow-up services. Alright. So next, I'll talk about grade levels. Grade levels will also automatically roll over from year to year. The grade sequence, will also roll over. So, you know, you k k one, two, three, four, five, etcetera, comes over as well. Students will automatically roll over to the next grade level upon reenrollment. And if families will be enrolling via enrollment management integrated contracts, the grade sequencing will actually be set up over in core as opposed to tuition management. If you may need to make updates to either the grade levels or sequence, please reach out to support and we can get you all set up. One thing I wanted to note is that if you have situations where students are withdrawing for a school year but the family is still responsible for payments, marking all students on an account as withdrawn will automatically disable automatic payments. So if you find that that's a situation that comes up on a regular basis for you, what we can do is create a new grad... Grade level. WDWB is is my go to there, withdrawn with balance. So you can set the students to that new grade level and have them still be eligible for auto draft payments. So if that's a situation that comes up, definitely recommend creating that new grade level. It doesn't have to be w d b... W d w b. It can be whatever you want want it to be, but that one tends to work pretty well. And next, we'll cover some of the invoice and payment reminder settings. So invoice settings also roll over when you open the new school year. These settings can be found under settings, manage school settings, and tuition management. From the menu on the left hand side of the page, select communication settings as seen in the screenshot here. Now, the settings that you can adjust include the number of days before the due date or the number of days before the due date that invoices are sent to manual paying families. You can adjust that to be between five and twenty five days before the due date. You can also select here whether you're using family or student based invoices. The student based invoices tend to break the billing down, by students. So it's a little more detail of a breakdown there. Auto debit invoices are also an option. Now auto debit invoices, send the same invoice that manual paying families receive to the auto pay families as well as their auto debit reminder. It used to be a bigger of a deal than it is now, but we recently added billing details to the auto debit reminders. So generally speaking, there's not a need to have the auto debit invoices enabled. By default, invoices, are sent to your manual paying families twenty days prior to the due date. You can adjust that, as I said, to to send them anywhere from five to twenty five days before that due date. Families set up for automatic payments will receive auto debit reminders. Now auto debit reminders are sent to families ten days prior to their due date. There is no adjustability for the auto debit reminders. That is always going to be ten days. Just again, the auto debit invoice is an option but generally not something, that you'll need to set up anymore. Like I said, that will send both the auto debit reminder and the standard invoice to families, but isn't really necessary anymore due to recent product updates. The other item we have are welcome letters. Now welcome letters are kind of a high level billing breakdown that families receive, at the start of the school year. It's just kind of got each billing month with the amount that is billed, for each of those months, and some instructions for getting accounts set up. Now those by default are gonna send twenty days before the family's first due date with billing due. You can adjust the welcome letter settings. If you want, you can adjust it to send between five and twenty five days before the due date. If you have a specific date that you would like them to send, you could choose that. So, you know, if for example, you don't want families to get welcome letters until June 1, we can schedule them to send out on June 1. In both of those situations, if a family enrolls after that window, the welcome letters will send within the first day or two after that account is created. So if you send, if you have them set to send on June 1 and a family enrolls on June 15, they will just get those welcome letters immediately as opposed to them going out on the scheduled date. You can also set up welcome letters to send, upon accounts being made active. So if you want as soon as the account is made active, to have those sent out that is an option there as well. I do recommend if you're using that option to make sure you have your billing set up for the families, because they will get that billing breakdown, in the welcome letter. So, if the billing amounts are still changing a little bit after the account is made active, sometimes it's better to have those welcome letters send out, a little after the fact. That way, you can get the billing updates completed and they get an accurate review of their billing in that welcome letter. Now, the last item I want to go over that automatically rolls over with the school year are saved custom reports. Now, if you use saved custom reports, you can find them under the Reports and Saved Custom Reports menu intuition management. You can also create new custom reports from that same reports menu. Prior to running your saved custom reports for the first time during a school year, you'll notice they will all be highlighted in a kind of angry red color. This does not prevent the reports from being run. To remove the red highlight, click edit next to the report. I definitely recommend confirming your report selection and criteria are still correct when you're doing that edit process and then save them. Once you save it, the reports, will no longer be highlighted in red, and you'll know that they're all all all good to go for the new school year. So now I wanna take a look at a couple of settings that cannot be changed once enrollment has started. As mentioned earlier, whether a fee or a discount is student or family based cannot be updated once that's been applied, to an account. So that is definitely a big one that you wanna get, set up right before you start applying billing. A fee or discount also can't be deleted once it's been applied to any students or families. So, in the screenshot here you can see, for example that the top item has an orange remove button next to it which indicates that it has not been applied to any families, and that the item below it does not have an orange remove button and we can see there that it's been applied to some families and there's an amount that's been applied. So once an item is added to accounts, you're not able to remove it. If you're still... If the first billing month hasn't passed, you can remove it by removing it from all families, but after that first billing month has passed, it's pretty locked in for the year. One of the things I always recommend to folks is that once you open the new school year, head over to manage fees and discounts, because every, you know, when you when you open the new year, every item will have that remove button next to it and it's just a great time, to clean that up. And if you're not sure which items are getting getting used or which aren't over the course of a school year in the current school year, if you go over to manage fee and discounts, any fee with a remove button has been applied to a family for that school year. So you can kinda use that to gauge, what night might need to be removed for the upcoming school year. Payment plans are also one that, gets a little dicey once the school year has started. So if you're making updates to payment plan settings at the school level, for example, opening an additional month for tuition billing, or entirely adding a new billing month to the payment plan, those updates are not retroactive. If you add a new month to a payment plan after families are already enrolled in that... Under that payment plan, that month will not automatically be added to those families plans. Those settings will only apply to families who enroll moving forward. Now there is an option to get those new payment plan settings, reflected for the family and that is by refreshing the family's payment plan. This also... Refreshing a payment plan will drop any past months from the plan. So if you have a plan that starts in August and you refresh it in September, August will be dropped from that payment plan and you are not able to add it back into the plan once it's been dropped. For that reason, refreshing payment plans is best done, before that first billing month has ended for families. If a month already exists on a payment plan and is not open for tuition, we can open that for tuition billing, and this will apply to already enrolled families. So, if you have an August through October plan and November's on the plan for incidental billing, but you want it to be open for tuition, we can open November for tuition, and then you would be able to load that billing in for existing families. Opening those months will not affect the already applied billing so those updates won't happen automatically. It won't automatically spread that billing across the months, but it will allow you the option to. If you go into edit billing details on the payment plan, you'll see those newly open months and you can load that billing into them. Like the billing items, payment plans and due dates cannot be deleted if they're in use by any families. They can be removed if all families enrolled in the payment plan or due date or switch to other payment plans or due dates, but otherwise, we're not able to remove them. Again, you can remove them from parent... Parent view via the parent enrollment options, but there's no way to totally remove them if families are enrolled in those plans or under those due dates. And to bring us home, I really quick wanna go over a couple of items that are particularly important if you're using our integrated contracts via enrollment management. The first of those is the number of days before the due date that a contract can be submitted. For example, if you have an annual payment plan that has a due date of June 20, this setting controls how close to the due date a contract can be submitted without receiving errors. By default, that setting is set to twenty days. So if your, due date is June 20, starting June 1, families would get errors on that payment plan, but we can adjust that to be as close as five days before the due date. So that would allow families in this example to use that payment plan through June 15 before you would need to add a new payment plan to the contract or, update them once on your existing payment plan. If you need to review or update that setting, you can reach out to tuition management support team who can tell you what your current settings are and update them for you if needed. Personally, I find that setting it to five days has more pluses than minuses, as it allows families to to get a couple extra weeks in, versus the default setting, and enroll in those payment plans without getting an error. Payment plan, and tuition months and due dates are also important when enrolling via contracts. If you have families enrolling throughout the school year, past months will be dropped from plans as families enroll. As I kinda touched on it in the payment plan sections, we can kinda edit edit those as things go forward. So, if you needed to open additional billing months for tuition on an existing plan, we can do that as we go throughout the school year, just to keep those payment plans viable and so families don't get errors as they're going through there. For non monthly payment plans, this is like I said, this is particularly applicable to the annual payment plans. Enrolling late can cause errors because if they enroll after the tuition billing month has passed or after the due date for that current month has passed, they'll get an error when they try to complete their contract as, tuition management will drop any past payments from... Will drop any past months from the payment plan, and that usually will result in an error or something to the effect of no valid months to apply. As I mentioned, we can modify existing payment plans if you'd like, to keep those payment plans viable. Now the other item I wanna touch on for contracts are your billing item distribution settings. Those are the ones set up via settings and manage fees and discounts in tuition management. If a billing month is mapped only to months that aren't available on the family's payment plan, the family will receive an error when submitting their contract. For example, if you have a fee that is mapped to August but August does not exist on the payment plan, the family would receive an error on their contract if that billing item is being used on, the contract. If it's not being used on the contract, this isn't as big of a concern. It won't cause an error on the contract if it's not on there, but making sure there are months for the billing to load into via the fee settings, is also a very important one and one that causes a lot of errors, in my experience. If you're using the first month or across tuition months or the across plan distribution types, this generally isn't an issue because those settings kind of follow whatever the payment plan is so they will adjust themselves so to speak to fit the situation. But if you're using specific months, it's very possible to have, like my example, something that is mapped to August, but once August is done, doesn't have anywhere to load into. So reviewing your distribution settings on enanti's and discounts is particularly important if you're using those enrollment management integrated contracts. That puts us at about time and that is all I've got for you today. Thank you so much for attending. I really appreciate it. I love doing these sessions and I love the feedback we get afterwards, and hopefully, hopefully, there's some information that you can take home with you here. Again, you can download today's deck from this presentation and we will be emailing you a link to the recording. Here, I feel like usually in in the first, twenty four hours or so, so you should see that here before long. If you have a question that did not get answered, we'll do our best to follow-up with you here, after our presentation as well. Thanks again so much for attending, and I hope you all have a great rest of your day and a good week.