How to bill a family with several children
When one family has two or three children in your classes, billing can get complicated quickly. A brother and sister might go to different classes on different days, one of them might add a second session halfway through the term, and the parent ends up with a handful of separate payments that are hard to keep track of. One bill for the whole family is easier for parents to understand and easier for you to follow up. This guide explains how to set prices, how to handle changes during the month and what to do when a payment goes wrong.
Give every class a clear monthly price
The simplest approach is a fixed monthly price for each class. A parent can look at your timetable, add up the classes their children go to and know what they will pay before they sign up. Most families would rather pay the same amount every month, even though some months have four sessions and some have five, than work out a new total each time.
Think about how you treat a child who comes more than once a week. If a karate class runs on Monday and Wednesday, you can treat each session as its own class with its own price, so a child who comes twice pays for two classes. That keeps the rule easy to explain: every session on the timetable has a price, and the bill is the total of the sessions each child has joined.
Bill the family, not the child
Imagine a family with two children. Amy goes to a junior yoga class at £22 a month, and her brother Sam goes to two karate sessions a week at £25 each. If you bill each child separately, the parent has two payments to make and two bills to check every month. If you bill the family instead, the parent sees one bill of £72 a month, with each child's classes listed underneath.
A single bill means one payment date and one place to look when something does not add up. It also tends to mean fewer missed payments, because the parent only has one thing to remember and one card to keep up to date.
Choose one billing day
Pick a single day each month on which every family is billed. The 1st of the month is a good choice because it is easy to remember and easy for parents to plan around, especially if they are paid at the end of the month. A shared billing day also makes it easy to see which families have paid for the current month.
If a family joins in the middle of a month, you need a rule for their first bill. One fair approach is to charge only for the part of the month that is left, and then the full monthly price from the next billing day onwards. That way nobody pays for weeks they could not attend, and every family ends up on the same billing day.
Plan for classes added part way through the month
Children often add a class once they have settled in. A girl who started with a Saturday dance class might want to join the Wednesday session as well, and she might decide this on the 18th of the month. It is much easier to decide what happens to the bill before this comes up than to work it out separately for each family.
A fair and common rule is to charge for the days left in the month straight away, and then the full price from the next bill. For example, if a £30 class is added with half the month remaining, the family pays about £15 now and £30 a month after that. Tell families the rule before they sign up, so that the extra charge does not come as a surprise.
Plan for classes dropped
Families also drop classes, perhaps because of exams, a new hobby or a change in their working hours. Decide in advance how the bill changes when they do. A simple rule is that the current month stays as it is, with no refund, and the next bill is lower.
Whatever rule you choose, free the seat in the class straight away. A popular class often has someone hoping to join, and it is better for that seat to be taken than to sit empty until the end of the month.
Make late payments easy to spot
Some payments will fail, usually because a card has expired or an account is short of money on the day, and it is rarely a sign that a family does not want to pay. Check for failed payments regularly, and follow them up early and kindly.
The hard part is often finding them. If you have to search through bank statements or a payment provider's reports to see who has not paid, late payments can go unnoticed for weeks. A short list of families whose payment has failed, kept somewhere you look every week, makes the follow-up quick and keeps the amounts owed small.
Write the rules down
None of these rules work unless families know about them. Put your billing rules on your website or in your welcome pack, in plain words: when families are billed, what happens when they add or drop a class, and what happens when a payment fails. A parent who knows the rules is far less likely to be surprised by a bill, and far more likely to trust you when something does need sorting out.
How VPage helps
VPage gives each family one monthly bill in pounds, taken on the 1st, which adds up the classes for all of their children. Each session on your timetable is its own class with its own monthly price. When a family's billing starts, they pay for the rest of the current month straight away and then the full amount from the 1st. Adding a class charges the difference for the days left in the month straight away, while dropping a class frees the seat at once and lowers the next bill, with no refund for the current month. Your dashboard shows how many subscriptions have a failed payment, so you know when to follow up, and parents enter their card details on a secure Stripe page. See how billing works for parents.