Free Fee Management for Universities

A college bursar manages tuition, room and board, and a handful of fees. A university bursar additionally manages a research-stipend layer, an international-tuition differential layer, a graduate-assistantship tuition-remission flow, and federal tax reporting at scale. OpenEduCat's university configuration enables all four of those layers out of the box. The college configuration is a simplified subset that omits the assistantship and 1042-S workflows because most undergraduate-only institutions never trigger them.

Each assistantship is recorded as an appointment with a start date, end date, weekly hours, effort percentage, and funding source. The stipend portion routes to the HR and payroll module for biweekly or monthly pay with proper federal, state, and FICA withholding. The tuition-remission portion posts as a credit on the student's bursar account at the start of each term, offsetting the underlying tuition charge. Auditors see both halves of the transaction without manual journal entries.

Invoices display in USD as the system of record, but the student portal can render an estimated local-currency equivalent using a daily exchange rate feed. When the student pays through Flywire, Western Union GlobalPay, Convera (formerly Western Union Business Solutions), or a direct wire, the actual converted USD amount is reconciled against the invoice automatically, and any FX shortfall is posted as a small balance the student can clear during enrollment confirmation.

Yes. The fees module shares the same Odoo-based ORM as the OpenEduCat HR and payroll module, so assistantship appointments, effort allocations, and grant funding sources are a single record rather than a sync between two systems. If your campus uses an external payroll system such as Workday HCM or ADP, the module exposes a standard JSON-RPC and REST API for bidirectional sync of appointments, earnings, and tuition-remission credits.

Workday Student and Ellucian Banner Finance are enterprise SIS-and-finance suites with seven-figure implementation budgets and multi-year deployments. OpenEduCat is free and open source, deployable on commodity infrastructure or self-hosted Kubernetes, and customizable in Python rather than locked behind a proprietary configuration layer. Universities typically use OpenEduCat as their primary system in scenarios where the total cost of a Banner or Workday rollout would exceed annual tuition revenue, or as a transitional system while migrating off a legacy mainframe.

Yes. The chart of accounts is configurable to align with NACUBO's higher-education financial-accounting framework, including unrestricted, temporarily restricted, and permanently restricted net asset classes, and functional expense categories required for IPEDS Finance Survey reporting. Standard reports include the Statement of Activities, fund-restriction roll-ups, tuition-discount-rate calculation, and net-tuition-revenue analysis required for accreditation review.