Where to find it
Core › Late Fee Automation. It carries its own permission, so if you cannot see it, ask your school administrator to give you Late Fee Automation in Users & Privileges.
What it changes, and what it does not
Your late fee policy does not change at all. How much a late payer is charged is still decided by Core › Late Fee Fine — the method, the amount and the Max Limit — exactly as before.
What this screen adds is when. Until now a member of staff had to open Pay/Print Fee Challans and press Add Fine, or the fine only appeared at the counter on the day the parent paid. Set a schedule here and the fine is put on the challan on its own, so it shows on a reprint, in the Parents App and in your fee reports.
Setting it up
- Choose the campus. Each campus has its own schedule, because each campus has its own late fee policy.
- Choose when the fine applies — on the due date, the day after, or after a grace period of however many days you allow.
- Set your weekly off days and decide whether to defer past them and past the Holiday Calendar.
- Press Preview today's run. You will be shown exactly which children would be fined and how much. Nothing is charged by a preview.
- Only then tick Apply late fees automatically and press Save.
Nothing happens until you switch it on
The feature ships switched off for every school, and saving a schedule with the switch off changes nothing. When you do switch it on, the first run looks at that day only — it will not go back and fine months of old challans.
If your policy is per day, the fine keeps growing
A per-day policy charges for every day a challan is late. So the fine is applied on your chosen day and then increased every day the challan stays unpaid, up to the Max Limit on your policy. That is the same total a parent would have been charged at the counter, just visible from the start instead of only at the moment of payment.
It stops immediately when the challan is paid, when any payment is made against the fine, or when somebody changes the fine by hand.
Weekends and holidays
If the day a fine is due falls on your weekly off or on a day in the Holiday Calendar, the fine is moved to the next working day. It is never charged on a day the school is closed, and it is never skipped — so a fine due on Sunday lands on Monday, and Monday's run applies both days.
Your weekly off is set here, not in the Holiday Calendar, so you do not have to enter 52 Sundays a year.
What was charged, and by whom
Run history at the bottom of the screen lists every run for that campus — the date, whether it was the schedule or a person, how many challans were fined, how much in total, and why a run was deferred. Use Run now if you want to apply a run by hand; it appears in the same history with your name against it.
Two things to check before you switch it on
- The campus must have an Active late fee policy. Without one there is nothing to apply, and the screen will not let you enable the schedule.
- Your policy's Max Limit must not be zero. The limit is applied to every policy, so a Max Limit of 0 produces a fine of 0 — for automatic and manual fines alike. The screen warns you if yours is set that way.