How instalments operate

Your organisation can elect to have certain fees charged in instalments throughout the year rather than a lump sum because you want:

• Fee income progressively through the year, rather than a lump sum at the start of the year.
• The ageing of the fee charge on the debtors account to match arrangements that you have made for payments. Although the charge is allocated to the debtor's account at the start of the year, it does not age until the instalment is actually charged out.

Select the Use Instalments flag on the General tab of Fee Maintenance for each fee that is charged out in instalments. See Debtor Fee Maintenance - General tab.  To set up instalments, see the Synergetic Financial Configuration - Debtors tab - Page 1 sub-tab.

The instalment frequency can be changed for individual debtors as required. This can be done when sending out debtor statements, offering them the option of alternative instalment frequencies.

You can view instalments that have not yet been charged out on the Debtor Maintenance - Instalments tab for each individual debtor.

An alternative to using instalment billing is to process tuition fees periodically throughout the year. For example, each term rather than just at the start of the year. See Automatic Tuition. You then run the Debtor Instalment Charges program and the instalment amount then starts ageing. See Applying instalment charges.

Unearned Instalments Control account

If your organisation uses the instalments method of charging student fees:

• The initial fee charge posts the first instalment to the G/L Income account.
• The remainder posts to the Unearned Instalments Control account.
• Any further charges are deducted from the Unearned account and added to the Income account.

For example:

In this example, $100 is posted to the Income account and $900 to the Unearned Instalments Control account.

Instalment Frequency

The default instalment frequency is set up using the Module > System > Finance Configuration Maintenance > Debtors tab. See Synergetic Financial Configuration - Debtors tab in the Finance manual.

You use the instalment frequency to specify whether to schedule another instalment charge when you run Debtor Instalment Charges. See Applying instalment charges.