Free Fee Management for Boarding Schools

Day-school fees are mostly tuition plus a few add-ons. Boarding adds a second full layer: the boarding charge itself (often more than tuition), the mess and dietary plan, laundry, weekend transport, prep supervision, and an activity stack (music, equestrian, sailing, expeditions) that day pupils do not carry. Parents expect one consolidated invoice, the bursar needs each layer posted to a separate ledger account, and the inspectorate (Ofsted boarding, ISI, CIS residential standards) wants to see the boarding charge clearly separated from tuition for governance reporting. OpenEduCat models all of this as discrete fee heads on one invoice.

Yes, and this is the part most general-purpose school software gets wrong. The school's books stay in the home currency (GBP, INR, AED, whatever your statutory accounts use), but the parent in Dubai sees AED, the parent in Singapore sees SGD, and the parent in Lagos can choose USD or GBP. The system stores the FX rate used on the invoice date, reconciles the actual payment received against the booked amount, and posts the difference to a realised-FX account. Auditors get a clean trail and parents stop arguing about which exchange rate applies.

The houseparent (or boarding administrator) signs the pupil out for exeat in the hostel module. The fees module reads that record and, on the next invoice cycle, auto-generates a credit at your configured per-diem mess rate, typically calculated as the termly mess charge divided by the number of boarding days in the term. Refunds for partial days, late returns, or medical exeat use the same engine with different rules. Every credit is traceable to the exeat record that triggered it, which is exactly what an ISI or Ofsted boarding inspector wants to see.

Yes, because they are the same Odoo-based ERP. When a pupil is enrolled in admissions, their house, year group, dietary plan, and activity choices flow straight into the fee schedule. When housing reallocates them from a junior dorm to a senior single room, the next invoice picks up the new boarding rate automatically. Bursar offices that previously re-keyed data between a separate SIS, a hostel spreadsheet, and accounting see most of that disappear.

OpenEduCat does not run an FX hedging desk for you, and you should be honest with parents about that. What it does provide is the data: locked contract rates per family, expected receipts by currency and date, and realised-vs-booked FX variances. Most boarding schools take that data to their corporate treasury or bank and run forward contracts there. A handful of schools choose to lock the home-currency price into the parent contract and let the parent carry the FX risk; the software supports both models, but the policy decision belongs to the bursar and governors.

Yes. Every fee head posts to its own ledger account, so the board's finance committee sees boarding revenue, tuition revenue, mess, and activity income as separate lines. Concessions, bursaries, and refunds are journal entries, not silent edits. Receipt numbers are sequential and non-editable once issued. For UK schools, this maps onto the National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools and the ISI's commentary on residential financial controls; for the Boarding Schools' Association Commitment to Care framework, the same data supports the governance and financial-stewardship sections without extra spreadsheet work.