News & Updates

How To Track Discounts On Student Payments

By Paolo Dona — Sep 13, 2011

Many language schools offer discounts on their lesson fees as a promotional and student retention tool.

They might be in form of vouchers, discounts for long enrollments or outstanding credits from previous courses.

Tracking discounts correctly is important to have clear visibility of your cash flow and get correct figures from your daily cashiers.

In order to track discounts in NiftySchool, we suggest the following method:

1) Create one payment type for each discount method

For example you could create three new entries in your payment types setup panel: Vouchers, Credit, and Discount.

When setting up these new payment types, make sure to tick the ‘This only accepts negative values’ checkbox.

This will be your safeguard when taking payments, as it will check the amount and prevent mistakes such as tracking positive discounts.

A discount will always have a negative amount (eg: -£50).

2) When taking a payment, add one row for the full amount and another one for the discount

Imagine you’re taking a payment worth £2000, and the student is entitled to a discount of £100.

You would enter two payment items: one worth £2000 (Cash) and the other worth -£100 (Cash) for the discount:

It’s important to mark the discount with the same payment method as the fees (Cash in the example), so that the daily cashier can be reconciled correctly:

Having marked the discount types as ‘Only negative’, the system prevents you from making mistakes:

This simple procedure allows you to have correct breakdowns of your payments and will give your accountant a precise picture of your transactions when downloading the payments in Excel format.