Fee collection usage

What this is, day to day

Collection is the part of fees that runs every working day once setup is finished. A finance operator spends most of it on one screen, /fees/collections: find the student, look at the outstanding installments, take the money, hand over the receipt. Everything else on this page is an exception path - a cheque that bounced, a concession somebody promised, a refund, or a family that has stopped paying. Access is the same five roles as the rest of fees: Platform Admin, Principal, Vice Principal, Support Staff - Finance and Admin. A teacher can see fee lines for their own class through /my-class but cannot take payment, and families see only their own balance.

The counter round

1. Open /fees/collections and search by name, registration number or roll number.
2. Read the balances. Each row is one installment with its own due date and status, and the dialog shows the calculated late fee as "if paid today" - an advisory figure that is never added to the balance and cannot be collected on that line.
3. Record the payment. Choose CASH, CHEQUE, BANK_TRANSFER, CARD, ONLINE or OTHER, and add the cheque number, bank or transaction reference. Part payment is allowed at the counter; anything above the outstanding balance is rejected.
4. Save. A receipt number is allocated from the RCP-YYYY series, the fee instance is recomputed from its completed payments, and a receipt dialog opens. Several lines saved together are grouped under one batch receipt number and print as a single multi-line receipt.
5. Send the receipt from that dialog, or later from the Receipts tab at /fees/payment-history?tab=receipts. This is a deliberate click - counter payments do not email themselves.
6. Take the next student. There is a rate limit of thirty payments a minute per operator, which a human will never reach but a stuck script will.

Exceptions, and who has to sign them off

Two things about that table are easy to get wrong in practice. A partial refund still marks the whole original payment refunded, so the full amount drops out of the paid total on the fee instance rather than just the refunded part - reconcile accordingly. And a waiver raised against a fee type rather than a specific fee instance is stored and can be approved, but it changes no balance at all, which is the most common reason a promised concession never appears on a family ledger.

What families see and do

• /fees/me - balance and history. Parent notification links carry both studentId and childId set to the same student, and a parent not linked at /parents is refused. Staff who open it are redirected to the fees hub.
• /fees/pay-online - available only when the checkout mode is set, and it accepts the full outstanding balance of one installment. Part payment online is refused, so send those families to the counter.
• Autopay is not a family screen. /fees/autopay is staff-only, and a mandate produces in-app reminders on a monthly schedule rather than charging anything.
• Transport riders see monthly TRN lines on the same screen, and a library fine appears as an ordinary fee instance due in fourteen days.

Limits

• The overdue list is only maintained by the daily job. Without it /fees/defaulters still lists unpaid lines past their due date, but the dunning step and last-contacted columns stay empty, so nobody can tell which families have already been chased.
• A payment cannot exceed the outstanding balance of one installment, so penalties and part-of-a-later-installment collections need their own fee instance.
• Receipt numbers are allocated sequentially per calendar year and are unique, so a receipt cannot be re-issued under the same number after a correction.