Tuition and the office · for mesivtas and zals
Tuition, without
the spreadsheet.
The registration folder goes in in one pass. Award assistance and the family's whole year rebuilds itself. Dorm, seforim and shabbatons land on the right family. And your parents read the same numbers you do, so nobody is arguing about whose figure is right.
A conversation first. We'll walk you through the whole thing.
What it takes off your desk
The jobs that eat a bookkeeper's week
Registration day
The whole folder of cheques, in one pass
Type the family, the cheque number, the amount, the date. Enter adds it and jumps back to the family field. You never touch the mouse, and a folder of forty takes a few minutes.
A cheque dated ahead is held, not deposited — recorded against the family, but honest about the fact that it is still in your safe. When its date comes round, closing the deposit run banks it and settles the installment it belongs to, oldest first, including last year's.
After the committee meets
Set the number. The year rebuilds itself.
An award is not a discount at checkout — it changes what the family owes. So when the committee decides, the family's ten installments are rewritten against the new figure on the spot, and the parent's own page shows the new plan before they ring to ask.
The committee sees the request beside what the family got last year, and how much of the pool is left. What it does not see is a recommended number, because that decision is not software's to make.
When a parent phones
One page with the whole story on it
Balance, what the year is made of, every installment, the charges beyond tuition, the contract, the award, and the last thing anyone in the office actually said to them. You are not opening four screens while they wait.
And nothing sends itself. No automatic letters, no automatic late fees. The office decides who gets called, and a family in the middle of a conversation does not get a letter.
Search that finds the cheque
A family name, a boy's name in Hebrew, or a cheque number. It looks across all of them at once, so “which family was #4192” is one box rather than a hunt through the folder.
The exports your accountant asks for
A proper double-entry journal for QuickBooks, aging, a forecast, and a statement per family. Real files that open in Excel, Hebrew names intact.
Contracts that create the plan
Sent, opened, signed, with the binding date in the terms rather than buried. Accepting is what generates the billing — so nothing is billed before it.
And it knows your year
Ten payments. Not twelve.
Tishrei and Nissan bring in no tuition, and payroll does not pause for either of them. Every system built for a twelve-month year makes the office fake this by hand — editing each family, or billing parents in two months when nobody expects to pay. Here the ten-payment year is the default.
Arrears belong to the year that ended. A balance carried from last Av is not this year's problem to hide — it is tracked as its own year and feeds the aging properly.
A family awaiting an award is not behind. Nobody has told them a number yet, so there is nothing to chase. They stay off the call list until the committee decides.
For the parent
The side of tuition nobody designs
A parent opens a tuition page for one reason: to find out where they stand. They read the same ledger you read, so they can never be shown a number the office would contradict — which is most of what a tuition phone call is about.
- It leads with what has been paid. Nothing on the page is red.
- The assistance award is shown openly — hiding it is what makes an adjusted rate feel like charity.
- Fees are named even when they are zero, because surprise is what parents resent, not money.
- One button for the statement their accountant needs.
- Asking for help is a slider: what can your family manage a month. It goes to the committee and nobody else.
Tell the office before a payment is missed. That sentence is on the page, with a way to do it, and no late fee runs while the conversation is open.
Deliberately out of scope
What it does not do
It does not take your money
No payments are processed. The school collects the way it collects today, and nothing flows through an account we control. When card and ACH do arrive, the funds go straight to the school's own bank.
It is not your general ledger
QuickBooks stays. Your accountant and your 990 need it, and replacing it would be a worse version of a solved problem. We hand it a proper double-entry journal instead.
It does not run your payroll
Withholding, quarterly filings, W-2s and multi-state registration are a compliance treadmill. That belongs to a provider who does only that, under our roof — not to us.
It will not guess at a rebbe's tax status
Whether someone is a minister for tax purposes is fact-specific and your CPA decides it. Software that assumes is software that gets it wrong quietly.
Getting started
See it with your own year in it.
Everything on this page works today — the screenshots are the real product rather than a mockup, and the figures in them are sample data.
Nobody hands over their tuition receivables after reading a web page, and we would not want them to. So the honest offer is a conversation: what your year looks like, what your office does by hand, and whether this fits.
A real person reads it.