A fee structure is one price for one class in one academic year, plus the plan for collecting it. A school priced at 175 000 XAF for First Year, cut into three instalments with due dates, is a fee structure. Everything downstream reads from it: what a learner is expected to pay when they are enrolled, which instalment a payment settles, and whether their file is cleared.

The bursar normally owns this screen, working once a year and whenever the school changes its prices. It is deliberately not a long list — a school has as many fee structures as it has classes, times the number of years it runs — so the table opens on the current academic year and lets you work one class at a time.

Two rules make the whole finance menu reliable, and both live here: one grid belongs to one class in one year, and the instalments must add up to the total exactly.

One grid, one class, one year

The Academic Year and Class fields are not decoration: together they decide who the price applies to. A grid that covers First Year in 2025/2026 leaves Second Year to be priced on its own, which is exactly what most schools want, because lower and upper classes rarely cost the same.

Give the title in both languages. Parents read this title on their receipts and in their own portal, so write it twice — once for English readers, once for French ones. “First Year — 2025/2026” and “Première année — 2025/2026” costs ten seconds and removes a support call later.

Retire a year without erasing it. When the school changes its prices, do not edit last year’s grid: switch its Active flag off. The history stays intact, past receipts still make sense, and the new year gets its own grid beside it.

The rows must add up to the total, exactly

Not approximately. If the total is 175 000 XAF, rows of 60 000, 60 000 and 55 000 XAF balance; rows of 60 000, 60 000 and 55 000.50 XAF do not, and the screen says so plainly in a warning chip. This is on purpose: a grid that collects a different amount from the one it advertises makes the clearance of every learner wrong.

The running line does the arithmetic for you

When you click Add Installment, the new row is pre-filled with the difference between your total and the rows already entered — in practice you type the first two instalments and let the last one take the remainder, which is where rounding differences usually land. Above the rows, a single line reads Total installments: X / Expected: Y and tells you which side is wrong.

Save stays disabled until it balances. There is no way to save an unbalanced grid, and that is a promise rather than a limitation: a fee structure can never sit in your books promising more, or less, than what families are actually asked to pay.

Edit amounts, do not delete rows, once families are paying. Adjusting the amount or the due date of an existing row is safe. Deleting a row that payments have already been attached to removes the plan behind money that has been collected, so change the row instead and leave its history readable.

Copy from another Fee structure

Inside the instalment manager there is a Copy from another Fee structure selector. Choose last year’s grid and the rows are filled in for you — names, amounts and due dates — so all you have to do is adjust the amounts to this year’s prices and check the dates still fall on term boundaries. When a whole stream moved up a class and two grids need the same numbers, tick the rows in the table and use the table’s duplicate action rather than opening each grid: the copies appear as new rows you can edit independently.

Then set the new year’s total. The copy brings instalments, not the total. Always read the total again after copying: it is the figure that is copied into each learner’s file at enrolment, so it is the one number worth double-checking before you save.