Fee collections.

Billing a family is easy; collecting from them is the hard part. The finance handbook covers how invoices are raised and how a payment posts to the ledger. This book covers what happens in between — the counter where cash is taken, the queue of invoices that have slipped past their due date, the report that ages every unpaid balance, the plan that lets a struggling family pay in steps, and the compliance desk that decides who gets a little grace.

A word on names first, because YESS is precise about them. The /dashboard/collections screen is the cashier till — front-of-house collection at the counter. The arrears work — overdue, aging, reminders, plans, compliance — lives on a handful of adjacent finance screens. This chapter walks both, and points you at the right screen for each job.

Collect with dignity: know exactly who owes what, and offer a way through before you chase.

The most direct collection is the one that walks up to the desk. The cashier till at /dashboard/collections is the unified front-of-house surface: a cashier opens a station, searches for a student, and takes a payment. For the fees station it lists the student's outstanding invoices and settles one; for the other stations it takes an ad-hoc line-item charge.

Stations the cashier is trusted with

A till is scoped to stations — the seven counters a school can run: fees, uniform, transport, canteen, shop, library, and other. A cashier only ever sees the stations they have been granted, and those grants are managed on an admin matrix at /dashboard/collections/stations. Granting and revoking are the only ways to change a till's reach — the grant table takes no direct writes, so access is always deliberate and auditable.

Taking the payment

Collecting calls a database function, collect_payment, which checks the cashier is allowed at that station, records the payment, reduces the invoice balance, posts the ledger entry, and returns a receipt number (in the shape RCP-YYMM-XXXXXXXX). The method must be one of six: cash, bank transfer, MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money, cheque, or other. The whole thing is one atomic step — there is no window in which the payment is recorded but the invoice is not reduced.

The till also carries a cashier-shift panel: the cashier opens the till with a float at the start of a session and closes it with a Z-report at the end. Reconciling those shifts — declared versus expected cash — is the accountant's cashier-shift desk covered in the finance handbook.

You cannot chase what you cannot see. Two screens make the debt legible — one a working queue, one an analytical report.

The overdue queue

The overdue tab at /dashboard/invoices/overdue lists every unpaid invoice past its due date, each with a days-overdue counter and a running outstanding total. One click flags an invoice as overdue (which shifts its status and colours the parent portal's summary). A daily job can also flip past-due invoices to overdue on its own — more on that in the reminders chapter.

The receivables-aging report

The aging report at /dashboard/finance-overview/aging is where the debt gets bucketed by how old it is. It reads a live view of every unpaid invoice line and sorts each balance into one of five ages:

• Current — not yet due (due date is today or later).
• 1-30 days — one to thirty days past due.
• 31-60 days — a month to two months overdue.
• 61-90 days — the balance that has started to worry you.
• 90+ days — the debt that needs a decision, not another reminder.

The report renders a stacked aging bar, a chip per bucket, and a drill-down table (student, class, invoice, due date, balance, days-overdue badge). The same view feeds the owner's collections panel on the financials dashboard, so the proprietor reads the same aged debt the bursar works.

A reminder is the gentlest form of collection. YESS has a real reminder engine at the database layer, and this is the chapter where the handbook is most careful to tell you exactly what is switched on.

When an invoice is issued, a trigger notifies the linked parents automatically ("New fee invoice"), skipping drafts, cancelled invoices, and zero-balance rows. Beyond that, a daily job (run_invoice_fee_reminders) can flip past-due invoices to overdue and send a one-time overdue notice. Reminder notices are rendered in each parent's preferred language — English, French, or Arabic — and fan out across the school's configured reminder channels (by default in-app, email, WhatsApp, and push), timed off a configurable schedule of days before the due date (7, 3, and 1 by default).

When a family cannot pay in full, the humane answer is a plan. Payment plans are fully wired end to end, from the parent's request to the final instalment.

The plans workspace is at /dashboard/payments/plans; parents request and follow their own plans from the fee portal at /portal/fees. A plan is visible to the school's finance staff and to the requesting family — the database restricts a parent to their own children's plans and instalments.

The fee-compliance desk at /dashboard/fees/compliance is the accountability view. It classifies every active student against what they should have paid by now, sorting them into states like unbilled, underbilled, arrears (paid less than the pro-rated amount due so far), and no structure (no fee structure assigned). It is how a bursar answers "who is behind, and why" without a spreadsheet.

Grace is a first-class action here, not a workaround. A school can grant a moratorium to a student — a documented reason, an optional extended-until date, and a flag for whether it is a full waiver. Only one moratorium can be active per student at a time. While a moratorium (or a timeline hold) is in force, the fee-hold check that would otherwise block a report card or transcript stands down for that student, so a family in genuine hardship is not locked out of their child's results over money.

Collection in YESS is strong where the money and the maths are — the till, the aging, the plans, the moratoriums are all real and wired. The softer "chase" layer is where the honest gaps sit.

Collections sit downstream of billing and upstream of the ledger. They lean on finance for the invoice and the posting, and on the notifications fabric and portals for the reminders and the parent request.