A payment plan is the how of tuition — it takes a family's total and turns it into a schedule they pay on. The same $6,000 of tuition might be one payment for one family, ten monthly payments for another, and a few big payments tied to your terms for a third. You build the options once, and families choose from them at checkout. This guide covers creating and managing payment plans.
Open Billing from the left sidebar and select the Payment Plans tab. The heading notes that plans define how families pay their tuition across the enrollment, and that you can attach discounts to early payment. Existing plans for the selected school year appear in a table with their start date. As with everything in billing, plans belong to a school year, so set the school-year selector first.
Select Add Plan to create one.
Every payment plan is one of three types, which you choose when creating it:
Tip: You don't need many plans. A one-time option and a monthly option cover most families. Add a quarterly or custom-phase plan only if families actually ask to pay that way — every extra plan is one more choice at checkout.
For a recurring plan, the two numbers that matter are the interval and the installment count. Lazarus divides the family's total (after all discounts) evenly across the installments, so a $6,000 total on ten monthly installments bills roughly $600 a month. The plan also has a start date that anchors when the schedule begins.
For a custom-phase plan, you lay out the phases in order, each with an end date. The first phase starts on the plan's start date; every later phase begins the day the previous one ended, so the timeline is continuous with no gaps. You can have up to four phases. The total is divided across the phases, giving you larger, less frequent payments aligned to your calendar.
Any payment plan can carry an early-payment discount to reward families who pay ahead of a deadline. When you set one up, you choose:
If a family pays before the deadline, Lazarus applies the discount to their total automatically; after the deadline, the discount simply doesn't apply. It's a gentle nudge toward paying up front without changing your headline rate.
Note: The early-payment discount is attached to the payment plan, not to a student. It applies to whoever chooses that plan and pays in time, so use it on plans where you actually want to encourage early payment — typically a one-time or up-front option.
You can edit a plan from the Payment Plans tab to adjust its details as your school year takes shape. Because plans are what families choose from at checkout, it's worth having them settled before you start sending tuition plans, so the options families see stay consistent.
That completes your setup: rates, discounts, and payment plans are the reusable building blocks for the year. Now you put them to work. The next guide covers assigning a tuition plan to an actual family — combining students, rates, and discounts into a bill and sending it to the guardian.