This is where setup becomes real money. A tuition plan is the bill for one family — it brings together the students, the rate each one pays, any discounts, and hands the family a link to choose how they'll pay. Everything you built in the previous guides comes together here. This guide covers creating a plan, sending it, and the lifecycle it moves through afterward.
A tuition plan belongs to a single household and is addressed to one of its guardians — the person who'll receive the bill and pay it. It can cover one student or several siblings together. For each student on the plan you pick a tuition rate and, if needed, add a discount; Lazarus applies your school-wide multi-student discount automatically when there's more than one child. The result is a single total for the family, which their chosen payment plan then splits into installments.
You'll create and manage tuition plans from a family's record. In Households, the Enrolled Students tab shows your enrolled roster and their tuition plans, and it's where you start a new plan for a student who doesn't have one yet.
When you create a tuition plan, you build it up student by student:
At this stage the plan is a Draft — yours to refine until it's right. Nothing has gone to the family yet.
Tip: Double-check the rate on each student before sending. The rate is the single biggest driver of what a family owes, and it's far easier to fix a draft than to correct a plan a family has already seen and started paying.
When the draft looks right, send it. Sending does two things: it moves the plan to Sent status, and it emails the guardian a secure link to their checkout, where they'll choose a payment plan and pay. That email is the Billing Link Email, whose wording you control on the Billing page under Email Settings — worth setting before your first send so families hear from you in your school's voice.
If you need to nudge a family who hasn't acted, you can resend the plan to deliver the link again.
A tuition plan moves through a clear set of states, and the state tells you whose turn it is:
You can edit a plan while it's a draft, and cancel a plan at most points if a family's situation changes. Cancelling stops future billing on that plan.
Note: Watch the status to know where to focus. Anything in Draft is waiting on you to send it; anything in Sent is waiting on the family. That single signal turns a long roster into a short to-do list.
Once a plan is sent, the guardian opens their link and chooses a payment plan and a payment method — card or bank transfer — and, for recurring plans, can set up autopay so installments are charged automatically as they come due. What that experience looks like from the family's side is covered in What Families See When They Pay. Families can also pay by cash or check, which you record manually — covered in the next guide.
With plans assigned and sent, billing shifts to the ongoing work: collecting installments, raising one-off invoices for extras, logging offline payments, and handling late fees and refunds. That's the next guide.