Fee heads, instalments and concessions
Fees in Ecole are built from fee heads, each with its own instalments carrying their own term due dates.
- Tuition
- Transport
- Books
- Exam
- Uniform
A late fine can be switched on for an instalment paid past its due date. It is off by default, so nothing charges a family extra unless the school has chosen to.
Concessions are typed and tracked, not written as a note on a receipt.
- Staff ward, granted directly by an accountant
- Sibling, granted directly by an accountant
- RTE, granted directly by an accountant
- Merit, needs a principal or correspondent to approve it
- Discretionary, needs a principal or correspondent to approve it
Every concession carries a reason and the name of whoever approved it, so nobody has to remember six months later why a fee was reduced. A merit or discretionary case needs a principal or correspondent to sign off before it applies.
Recording a payment at the counter
A payment is recorded as cash, UPI, cheque or bank transfer, exactly as it was received. Ecole issues the receipt as part of that same action and keeps the ledger behind it.
What a family owes is worked out at the moment someone asks, not read off a stored balance that could have drifted out of date.
Gapless receipt numbers, even at two counters at once
Receipt numbers are gapless: one continuous sequence per school, per academic year, whether the school runs one counter or several at once.
The mechanism is plain. Each school keeps one counter row for the current academic year. Issuing the next number takes a brief lock on that row inside the same transaction as the payment, so if two accountants save a payment on two different counters in the same second, the second one waits a fraction of a second for the first to finish, then gets the next number in line. Nothing skips and nothing repeats. For the fuller argument on why this matters at a busy counter, see zero-leakage school fee counter management.
If a payment fails partway through, for whatever reason, the receipt number it was about to use goes back into play rather than being burned. The sequence has no gaps left to explain later.
An append-only ledger: corrections, not edits
A recorded payment is never edited or deleted, by anyone, including by us. A wrong amount is corrected with a reversal that points back at the original entry; both stay visible in the ledger, so the record shows what actually happened, mistake included.
An accountant can correct their own entry on the day they made it. Past that day, a correction needs the principal, and it is logged. A cheque that bounces is handled the same way: a reversal against the original receipt, dated the day the reversal is made, never backdated to the day the cheque came in.
What happens, four situations at the counter
The rules above come down to four situations most fee counters run into sooner or later.
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| A wrong amount is entered | The accountant who made the entry corrects it themselves, the same day. After that day, only the principal can correct it, and the correction is logged. |
| A cheque bounces | The original receipt stays on record. The accountant enters a reversal that points back at it, dated the day the reversal is made, never backdated to the day the cheque came in. |
| Two counters take a payment in the same second | Each school has one receipt number counter per academic year. Issuing a number takes a brief lock on that counter row inside the payment itself, so the two payments queue for a moment and each still gets its own number, in order, with no gap and no repeat. |
| The school day ends | Each accountant closes against a day-book that totals what they recorded, split by cash, UPI, cheque and transfer, so the cash in the drawer can be counted against what the day-book says before handover. |
Day-book, Tally export and finding a defaulter
Each accountant closes their day against a day-book: what they collected, split by payment mode, so the cash in the drawer can be counted against what the day-book says before it is handed over. This is the fee reconciliation day-book that closes the gap between what was taken and what was banked.
The day's transactions export in a format Tally accepts directly, so Tally export for school fees does not mean retyping a day's receipts into the general ledger a second time.
An accountant finds a child by name rather than hunting for an admission number first. The defaulter list carries the phone number to ring, next to what is owed, so a follow-up call does not need a second lookup somewhere else. The same child is who a class teacher marks present or absent that morning, and who a principal sees on the dashboard without asking for a report.