How Tuition Payments are Applied

Eclectic Music operates on an academic year calendar, with tuition due six times during the course of the term (the seventh payment is for summer).

Sometimes people will ask "Which lessons will this payment cover?" If the office staff member gets uncomfortable when you ask this question, relax - there's nothing shady going on. It's simply a tricky thing to explain! Below, I give it my best shot.

Your Tuition Payment Pays for a Series

On the tuition due date, a "series" of lessons is either billed to your Eclectic Music account or your credit card. If the tuition is billed to your account, we await a check or credit card payment to cover the amount. That looks like this:

That 9/15 charge was the purchase of the series of six lessons. That appears in a separate place in our system (under "Series & Memberships"):

In the example above, this student has so far used only four out of the six lessons. If we wanted to know what dates those lessons were used, we have to go to another place. We click on "Show Visits."

Visit History

The image above shows that the 9/15 tuition payment (called "Prime-time, 30 min, one student") has so far been used for lessons on 9/27 and 10/4. Presumably, the next four lessons will be used on 10/11, 10/18, 10/24, and 11/1, but we don't check them out until after we receive the teacher's time card.

Time Cards

Each teacher fills out a time card like the one at right, every day they teach. We don't "check out" the lessons (i.e., connect the lesson credit to a specific visit date) until the teacher turns the time card in.

Per our policy, absences are charged except for students on our floating plan and for lessons that take place on the weekend, and even for those prior notice must be given. However, the time cards serve as a helpful "checks and balances" system to ensure that families are not billed for lessons cancelled by the teacher, and to make sure our teachers are following through on their commitments.

Checking Out Lessons

Once the lessons have taken place, each lesson on the time card is matched with a lesson already in the system.

Then, the lesson is "checked out" by pressing the "Check Out" button, which applies the payment and changes student's visit history to reflect that the lesson was offered:

When we look at the master schedule, we can see that the checked-out lessons are blue. The brown lessons on the left are for a teacher whose time card has not yet been processed:

Outstanding Credits

Eclectic Music builds in 36 lessons per year, except for students who have lessons on Monday - they only get thirty-three. In March, we take a look at the number of credits remaining on your account, make our best guess at how many more lessons you'll need to complete the school year, and prorate your bill accordingly. Last year, many Monday students did not need to make their March 15 tuition payment because they still had plenty of credits which had not yet been used to check out visits.

Contracts

The last thing I want to show you is the contract. It is set up on your account in the "Contracts" section. The contract is automated to bill either your account or card, whichever you prefer.

In the example above, the client's contract was set up on 7/30/11 (the "Eclectic Music Private Lessons" is a membership series we use to track our weekly students - there isn't a charge for it). The contract is set up to run on the following dates (note that 8/1/11 and 9/15/11 had already happened by the time this screenshot was taken):

In this case, the client's account will be debited. Of course we can update or cancel a contract at any point.

Why We Bill Ahead

A common question is, "Why do I have to pay tuition so far in advance? If I still have two lesson credits, why do I have to pay for the next six right now?"

The short, mean answer is: Because that's the way we gotta do it. As a private company, that is our right.

Having made our point, the nicer answer is that our tuition schedule is based on what has (and hasn't) worked for us in the past, from the ins and outs of collecting deliquent payments to the big picture of what it takes to manage hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses each year.

If we were going to carefully prorate each family's lessons every month (we used to do it that way when we had far fewer students), lessons would be more expensive because of the additional office staff it would require. Also, people don't pay on time, and when they don't pay on time, we don't know who will eventually pay us and who will never pay us. In the meantime, we still need to pay the teachers for the lessons we put on the calendar, so we need to know in advance who we need to take off the calendar.

There's a larger purpose, too. We want you to be so happy with the music education you're getting that you're in it for the long haul. The individual lessons, while important, are a sunk cost in the scheme of things. Beatles Night, recitals, open mics, festivals, jam sessions, and parties: How much are those worth?

Better to think of tuition as "tuition" instead of purchasing individual lessons. Hopefully, if you've skimmed all the way down to this point, you have peace of mind knowing that we will do right by you and make sure that your tuition payments are attributed carefully.

Thank you for your business!