A payment is a single, permanent line in the school’s books: who paid, how much, by which method, against which instalment, under which reference, and which member of staff took the money. Once it exists it stays, and a receipt can be printed from it at any time.

This is the screen your secretary lives in during the school day. Payments are not typed into a list from scratch — they are recorded on the learner’s own file, in Enrollments, so the instalment, the expected amount and the balance are already in front of you. The Payments list is the other side of the same coin: the day sheet, the audit trail and the figure the bursar reconciles at month end.

One rule gives this screen its value: a payment is never deleted. If something was entered wrongly, the answer is another visible entry that explains itself — never a row that quietly disappears.

The instalment decides what the payment means

Choosing the instalment is what makes a fee system work rather than merely record. The dialog only offers the instalments still outstanding for that learner’s class and year, and each payment is permanently attached to one of them. That attachment is what a bursar needs six months later to answer “what are they paying for?”.

The reference and the method identify the payment

Every payment carries a reference, and it must be unique. Use the family’s own reference — the mobile money transaction code, the bank transfer note — so a human can match your books to a screenshot in seconds. A generated reference is better than nothing; the operator’s reference is better still.

The method tells you what actually happened. Cash, MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money and Bank Transfer are kept separate, which is what lets you count the cash in the drawer at closing time and compare the mobile money figure with the operator’s statement. The cashier is attached to the line automatically, so close your day by reading the Payments list — it is already grouped by who took what. And every payment can be receipted again: each row has a download button that regenerates the PDF on the spot, so a parent who lost their copy gets a fresh one with the current branding.

Never delete a receipted payment — record a correcting entry

A parent has the receipt, the cashier signed it and the money left the school’s hands. Deleting the row would leave a gap that no longer matches reality: the Payments list is meant to be a record of what happened, not of what would have been convenient.

So open the same learner and record another payment: the same amount with the correct method or the correct instalment, a fresh reference, and a Note that says plainly what it is — “correcting entry for reference PAY-1420, entered twice at the counter”. The learner’s balance is recalculated from the entries you have, so the correction is visible to anyone who reads the history, and both lines remain readable months later. A wrong method is the same problem: if the money arrived by transfer but was recorded as cash, the correction is the same entry with the right method — never a phantom payment of the other kind to balance the books.

Let the note carry the explanation. The Note appears on the learner’s file and on the list. Thirty words are enough to save an argument: what was wrong, which entry it relates to, and who made the correction. A payment history that explains itself is worth more than a tidy-looking one.

Pending, partial, cleared

Every enrolled learner carries a fee assignment with two figures: Total expected, copied from the fee structure on the day they enrolled, and Amount paid, the sum of the payments recorded against it. Nothing to date and no payment at all leaves the status Pending. Some payment short of the total leaves it Partial. The moment Amount paid reaches Total expected, it becomes Cleared.

Clearance is recalculated on every payment

There is no separate “mark as cleared” button, because there does not need to be one: the comparison is redone after each entry you record. That is also why a correcting entry immediately changes the status back — the books, not a memo, decide. It is also where an agreed reduction belongs: set the negotiated figure on the enrolment itself, with the reason recorded, so the correction stays attached to the decision rather than to the money and the payment history remains complete.

A cleared file opens the next step. Clearance is a gate, not a decoration. An admission application waiting on fees is completed automatically once the balance reaches zero, and a course registration locked behind a fee balance unlocks itself. Recording the last instalment is therefore often the last administrative act a learner needs from your office.