Free Fee Management for Colleges

College billing is semester- or quarter-based rather than monthly, runs on credit-hour tuition rather than flat grade-level fees, and has to interoperate with financial aid (Pell, Direct Loans, state grants) rather than just collecting from parents. It also has to support mid-term withdrawal calculations and tax-form generation that K-12 systems never touch. OpenEduCat's fees module supports both, but the college configuration enables the credit-hour, financial-aid, R2T4, and 1098-T workflows that bursar offices actually live in.

Yes. When a student is flagged as withdrawn (officially or unofficially), the system pulls the period start date, the documented withdrawal date, the total Title IV aid that was disbursed or could have been disbursed, and produces the percentage-of-period-completed worksheet that drives the return calculation. Institutions are still responsible for the policy decisions and the 45-day return deadline per 34 CFR 668.22, but the worksheet, ledger entries, and audit log are generated automatically. The US Department of Education Federal Student Aid Handbook (Volume 5) is the reference we point implementers to.

Yes. The system aggregates qualified tuition and related expenses (Box 1) and scholarships and grants (Box 5) by calendar year, generates PDF 1098-T forms for student delivery, and exports the IRS electronic filing format compatible with the FIRE system. Corrected forms can be issued with the correction indicator, and students can opt in to electronic delivery from the portal in line with IRS Publication 1179 requirements.

When financial aid authorizes an award, the disbursement record sits on the student account as a pending credit with a scheduled disbursement date. On that date the credit posts against the student's charges and any excess is queued for refund within the 14-day Title IV refund window. If a student's FAFSA is still being processed at term start, the bursar can defer the first payment-plan installment to the expected disbursement date so the student is not delinquent for paperwork that the federal processor has not finished yet.

Yes. The fees module exposes a REST/JSON-RPC endpoint that flags student accounts past a configurable threshold. If you run OpenEduCat's own SIS, the hold flows directly into the enrollment workflow. If you run Banner, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Workday Student, Anthology, or a homegrown SIS, a developer wires the endpoint to your SIS hold table on a 15-minute schedule. When the student pays or signs a payment plan, the hold is released automatically without bursar staff having to touch it.

The proprietary higher-ed standards (Workday Student, Banner Finance, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Anthology Student) are deeply integrated suites with seven-figure implementation costs and per-FTE annual licensing, and they do far more than fee management — full ERP, HR, grants, advancement, the works. OpenEduCat is honest about scope: it is a credible bursar and student-billing solution for small-to-mid colleges that cannot justify a Banner contract, and it interoperates with whatever SIS or finance system you already run via API. Large state-system colleges with complex multi-fund accounting and 50,000+ FTE will outgrow it; community colleges, single-campus undergrad institutions, and growing private colleges are the fit.

Receipt numbers are sequential and non-editable once issued, refunds post as separate accounting entries (never as edits to the original receipt), R2T4 and 1098-T worksheets are reproducible from the ledger, and every concession or aid disbursement is logged with date, approver, and reason. This is the audit trail external auditors, state community-college system offices (think the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office or the State University of New York system office), and AACRAO bursar-practice reviews expect. The Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) benchmarks on financial-aid-related dropout reporting are the framework we encourage colleges to map their data exports against.