Lazarus gives you two ways to lower what a family pays, and they work differently. A one-off discount is something you apply to a single student when you build their tuition plan — a scholarship, a staff discount, a financial-aid award. A multi-student discount is a school-wide rule that automatically rewards families who enroll more than one child. This guide covers both.
One-off discounts aren't set up in advance — you add them to a specific student while building a tuition plan (covered in Assign & Send a Tuition Plan). When you do, you give the discount a name (for example, Scholarship), choose whether it's a fixed amount or a percentage, and enter the value.
Because they're applied per student, one-off discounts are the right tool for anything specific to one child or one family: aid you've awarded, a promised concession, or a correction. You can add one to any student on a plan, and it applies on top of their base rate before the family's payment schedule is calculated.
The multi-student discount is different: it's a single rule for your whole school, and Lazarus applies it automatically whenever a family enrolls more than one student on the same tuition plan. You'll find it on the Billing page under the Discounts tab, headed Multi-Student Discount. Each school year has at most one multi-student discount.
Select Configure (or Edit if one already exists) to set it up:
The key rule to understand: the first child always pays full price, and the discount applies to each additional child. Lazarus sorts the students so the highest-value enrollment is treated as the first child, which gives the family the best outcome.
Whether it's stackable changes how the discount grows:
Max Usages and Apply Beyond Limit work together to cap it. If you set a max of two, only the first two additional children are discounted by default. Turning on Apply Beyond Limit lets children past that cap still receive a discount at the capped level rather than nothing.
Tip: Most schools start simple — a flat percentage, not stackable, no cap. That gives every sibling after the first the same discount, which is easy to explain to families. Reach for stacking and limits only if your pricing genuinely calls for them.
Both kinds of discount can apply to the same plan. When Lazarus totals a family's tuition, it starts from each student's base rate, subtracts any one-off discounts you added to individual students, then subtracts the multi-student discount, and only then figures out the payment schedule. One thing to remember from the previous guide: a rate you marked as excluded from multi-student discounts is skipped by the multi-student rule, though one-off discounts still apply to it normally.
Note: The multi-student discount only kicks in when a tuition plan has more than one student on it. A family with a single enrolled child won't see it, which is exactly the intent.
You now have your rates and your discounts — the what it costs and what comes off. The next piece is how families pay it: payment plans, which turn a total into a schedule.