Setting up classes

How you can use Class Manager for your businesses different billing cycles

Setting up your classes on Class Manager is a vital part of completing your initial setup and doing so in the best way possible for your billing cycle could save you a lot of time in the future.

To begin, let’s make sure we are on the same page with some of the common Class Manager phrasings: 

1. Customer = The bill payer

2. Season = Billing period (start and end date)

3. Lesson frequency = How often the price occurs. The choices are:

• Termly - This method involves charging customers a fixed lump sum amount for an entire academic term regardless of the number of lessons within that term.
  Example: A university might charge $5,000 for a fall semester.
• Lesson - This method involves charging customers each time a lesson or service is provided. Either per lesson or in a bulk purchase.
  

  Example: A dance school may charge £5 per lesson, billing their customers per term based on the number of classes within that term.

• Week - This method involves charging customers a fixed fee weekly regardless of the number of lessons within that week.
  Example: A tutoring service might charge $50 per week for two sessions of math tutoring.
• Month - This method involves charging customers a fixed fee monthly regardless of the number of lessons within that week.
  Example: A music school might charge $200 per month for weekly piano lessons.

Below is a list of the most common billing cycles used on Class Manager with our recommendations of which has been the easiest for our customers who have really made use of all Class Manager has to offer. Pick which of Class Managers capabilities best suit your business (please note this is not the only capabilities of Class Manager; if you have a more niche billing cycle do please get in touch so we can help you set that up): 

2. Generating invoice for season - Allows you to manually generate invoices whenever you are ready which then get emailed to your customers along with information on how payments will be made.

Payment options - Depending on your choices customers can have:
                                  - Automatic payments triggered (Autopay with Stripe)
                                  - Credit/debit Card payments via Stripe (part/full payments)
                                  - Manual forms of payment (cash/BACS/cheque)
                                  - Payment plans     

What do you need to do? - After the initial setup of your classes and payment settings chosen, you don’t need to do much! Your customers can register, enter their card info and enroll into their classes via your portal. You will only ever need to log on to click ‘Generate invoices’, followed by ‘Approve invoices’ to send invoices to all your customers!          
         

3. PAYG (stand-alone) - Allows a Customer to book individual lesson(s) while making an upfront payment via Stripe. PAYG Customers will appear on the respective lesson register, only for the days they have booked on for.

Payment options - Stripe would need to be enabled.

What do you need to do? - Just the initial setup of Stripe and your classes. From there you can sit back and relax as customers book on and pay via your portal.

There is one more extra option…
 

Packages -  These are an extension from Generating invoice for season which allows you to replace the normal cost of classes that a student attends by a fixed amount for the season period. These work well for students that do a high amount of classes so they are given a fixed fee regardless of the number of lessons. 

Now your classes are setup, it is time to choose what Payment capabilities best suit your business (Please ensure that the payment method is suitable for your class setup before continuing to this step):

2. Auto trigger payment - This is when a payment is triggered once an invoice is approved. You can do this in two different ways..
1 - Using STRIPE to charge the customers card (long number) that they enter into their portal
2 - Using GOCARDLESS to charge the customer's card (sort code/account number) once the customer completes an active mandate.
  (What is the difference? - charging customers via the long card number means they can use a credit card or overdraft to pay. Whereas with the sort code/account number this is not possible).

3. Debit/credit card - This is done by Stripe giving the option to ‘pay by card’ directly from the customers invoice/portal. This can be only for full payments or part payments.

4. Manually mark invoices as paid - This is for payments that are not electronically linked to Class Manager such as cash, cheque or bank transfers. This means you would need to manually add these payments individually yourself each time they occur.