Late Fees

Modified on Wed, 22 Jul at 7:26 PM

Setup

If children are being picked up late or dropped off earlier than their booked time, administrators may wish to consider charging late fees.

Fees are typically charged in blocks of minutes, e.g. $10 per 15 minutes or $1 per minute and can be set up through the Centre settings as follows:

Navigate to Centre Settings > Centre Details tab > scroll to Early and Late Fees Settings.

Grace Period:

Late fees have a grace period and will only apply when a child's attendance exceeds that period.
Set the 'Before or after (minutes)' field to a whole number to indicate how soon before/after the booking time begins/ends the fee will apply.

Fee is Charged:
Type in the dollar value of the late fee, keeping in mind the time increments you will set next.
Every (minutes):
Setting a number of minutes in this field will tell Discover how often you would like the fee indicated in the 'Fee is Charged' field to apply.
Rounded to:
Nearest: time rounded to the nearest whole period.
Grace: time is rounded up or down according to the grace period.
Partial: time is not rounded, a partial charge will be applied.

Fields for late pick up include:

Once off fee: the dollar value of the fee charged after the initial grace period.
Every subsequent (minutes): the time period after which another fee will be applied.
Subsequent fee: the fee to be charged after the subsequent time period above has passed.

Automatic Charging

To automatically charge Early & Late Fees, enable the Enable Late Fee Automation setting within your Early & Late Fee Settings.

When automation is enabled, any applicable Early or Late Fees will be generated automatically as part of your centre's normal invoicing cycle.

As this is a centre-wide setting, all attendance records that meet the configured criteria will be processed automatically.

Note: If an automatically generated Early or Late Fee invoice is deleted, it may be recreated during the next invoice run if the attendance record still meets the charging criteria.

If you need to credit the Early/Late Fee it is best practice to apply a credit note.

Manual Processing

If you prefer to review charges before they are billed to families, leave Enable Late Fee Automation unticked.

Manual processing allows administrators to:

Review potential Early and Late Fee charges before invoicing.
Override charges where appropriate.
Select No Charge for individual occurrences.
Confirm which bill payer should receive the charge.

To manually process fees:

Navigate to Late Fees from the main menu.
Select the week you wish to review.
Click View to display all potential Early and Late Fee charges.
Review each charge and either:
- Select the bill payer to apply the fee, or
- Choose No Charge to waive the fee.
Create Invoices

Once processed, the resulting Early & Late Fee invoices will be included in the next statement issued to the family. If your centre uses Combined Statement and Invoice, the Early & Late Fee charges will be included alongside the child's regular fee invoice.

Other Functions

You can charge an initial and ongoing late fee.
You can set an out of hours late fee, which will be an additional charge triggered if the parent picks up or drops off outside of centre licensed hours.

Reporting

Navigate to Children Reports > Early And Late Charge to see charges for a given date range, with different thresholds of time (grace period) and to see all those that are Early and/or Late.

Attachments (1)

pdf

Sample Early Late Fee Report.pdf
36.5 KB