Tuition and billing is where Lazarus turns your enrolled students into revenue you actually collect. It can look like a lot at first — rates, discounts, payment plans, tuition plans, installments, invoices, late fees, payouts — but it all fits together in one straightforward chain. This guide gives you that mental model and shows where everything lives, so the rest of the series makes sense.
The Big Picture
Everything in billing flows in one direction, from the pieces you set up once to the money that lands in your bank account:
- Tuition rates — the base prices you charge, like Full Tuition or a Part-Time Rate. You define these once per school year.
- Discounts — reductions you can apply, whether a one-off scholarship on a single student or a school-wide multi-student (sibling) discount.
- Payment plans — the schedules families pay on: all at once, monthly, quarterly, or across custom phases you define.
- Tuition plans — the actual bill for one family. You combine the students, their rates, and any discounts into a plan, then send it to the guardian.
- Installments & invoices — the individual charges. A tuition plan breaks into installments on the family's chosen schedule, and you can also raise one-off invoices for extras like supplies or trips.
- Collection & payouts — families pay by card, bank transfer, or offline, late fees apply when payments slip, and the money is paid out to your bank through Stripe.
The first three are reusable building blocks you set up ahead of time. The rest is what happens each time you bill a family.
Where Everything Lives
Tuition and billing shows up in two main places:
- The Billing page — Open Billing from the left sidebar. This is your command center, organized into tabs: Dashboard (your money at a glance), Tuition Rates, Discounts, Payment Plans, and Email Settings. The setup building blocks all live here, and so does the reporting.
- A family's record — Inside Households, each family has a Billing tab, and enrolled students have their tuition plan detail. This is where you assign a tuition plan to a specific family and manage their installments and invoices. (See the Households series for the tour of that side.)
Most school-year setup happens on the Billing page; most day-to-day billing happens on the family's record.
A Few Concepts Worth Knowing Up Front
- Everything is scoped to a school year. Rates, discounts, and payment plans belong to a specific year, so you'll build a fresh set each year and pick the year you're working in from the selector at the top of the Billing page.
- Tuition plans have a lifecycle. A plan moves through Draft → Sent → Payment plan selected → Active → Paid, and can be Cancelled along the way. Knowing which state a plan is in tells you what to do next — covered fully in Assign & Send a Tuition Plan.
- Stripe powers the money movement. Card and bank (ACH) payments, payouts, and refunds all run through Stripe, so your Stripe account needs to be connected before you can collect online. Connecting Stripe is covered in the Getting Started guide.
- Processing fees can be passed on or absorbed. Depending on your settings, the card or bank processing fee is either added to what the family pays or covered by your school. You'll see both figures where it matters.
- Payments don't have to be online. When a family pays by cash or check, you log that payment against their installment or invoice so your records stay accurate — no Stripe involved.
How the Rest of This Series Is Organized
The guides follow the same order as the chain above:
- Set Your Tuition Rates — Defining the base prices families pay.
- Discounts — One-off discounts and the school-wide multi-student discount.
- Payment Plans — Building the schedules families pay on, including early-payment incentives.
- Assign & Send a Tuition Plan — Turning rates, students, and a plan into a bill and sending it to the guardian.
- Invoices, Payments & Late Fees — One-off and bulk invoices, logging offline payments, late fees, and refunds.
- The Billing Dashboard — Reading your metrics, tuition collection, transactions, and payouts.
- What Families See When They Pay — The guardian's side: choosing a plan, paying, and setting up autopay.
Ready to build the foundation? The next guide covers setting your tuition rates.
