From dues chased on printouts to cash flow you can watch
Representative scenario — illustrativeA 1,600-student school runs fee collection from a desk register and printed dues lists, with sibling and staff-ward concessions applied by hand and cheque bounces tracked on sticky notes.
Nobody can say the day’s realisation without adding up receipts by hand, and the outstanding list is a printout that is wrong by lunchtime. A sibling discount gets applied twice to one family and missed for another. Reminders go to whichever parents someone remembers, and the accounts office keeps a private spreadsheet that never quite matches the fee desk.
The cheap ERP could raise a flat invoice but couldn’t model the school’s real policy — instalments, class-wise heads, transport add-ons, sibling and staff concessions — so the clerk kept a parallel spreadsheet for discounts and reconciled bank payments by eye. Online payments didn’t match themselves to receipts. Six months in, the ERP was just a receipt printer and the real dues lived, once again, in Excel.
ez.school puts structures, invoicing, online payment and reconciliation on the student record itself, so the fee desk, the parent and accounts read the same number. Heads, instalments, transport add-ons and concessions are defined once as policy and applied automatically; online payments reconcile to receipts on their own. The collection dashboard shows billed versus collected as the month unfolds, and reminders go to exactly the parents who owe.
| By hand | Ordinary ERP | ez.school | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today’s collection | Add up receipts by hand | A total, no dues context | Billed vs collected, live |
| Concessions | Applied by hand, error-prone | Flat invoice, no discount logic | Sibling / staff rules auto-applied |
| Online payment | Reconciled by eye | Doesn’t match receipts | Auto-reconciled to the receipt |
| Chasing dues | Whoever gets remembered | Blanket reminder to all | Only the parents who owe |
- LiveRealisation this month
- One numberDesk, parent, accounts
- AutoPayments reconciled
Fee realisation and outstanding by class — the dues that need a reminder this week are a filter on the dashboard, not a printout that was wrong by lunch.