Payments Overview

[For Admins + Billing Only Role] Track and understand payments from parents to your program through brightwheel and external sources.

Hadleigh F avatar
Written by Hadleigh F
Updated over a week ago

This content is for our legacy billing platform. Update to our newest experience!

In brightwheel’s billing platform, payments are funds that come from parents to pay off a student’s total account balance. It’s important to understand that any particular payment is not applied to a specific statement. Payments simply reduce the balance owed by the parent to the school. Payments can be made online (paid through brightwheel using a bank transfer or credit card) or offline (entered by the admin for payments made outside brightwheel like checks or cash). Payments are shown in teal throughout the billing product to help them stand out.

Table of Contents

Online Payments

Online Payments are automatically tracked when a parent uses the brightwheel billing platform to send funds to your program to reduce their balance. Depending on your payment settings, this can be done through a credit/debit card or a bank transfer (ACH) and each carries a processing fee specific to your account. 

Parents are able to add as many payment methods as they would like to their accounts.

Credit Cards

When parents use a card to pay down their statements, the following events occur

  • The transaction posts to the Posted Transactions section of the student’s billing account as a negative amount immediately and the payment will be queued up for processing

  • Within a few moments, the payment will process and the status will change to succeeded or failed

Bank Transfer (ACH)

Just like with credit cards, parents can add checking accounts to their profiles to make payments. When parents use a bank account to pay down their invoice or account balance, the following events occur:

  • The transaction posts to the Posted Transactions section of the student’s billing account as a negative amount immediately and the payment will be queued up for processing

  • Within a few moments, the payment will begin processing

  • Funds will be fronted by brightwheel and deposited the next business day,

  • While your program will receive the fronted funds by the next business day, it can take 5-7 business days for a bank payment to fully process, depending on the parent's bank.

  • If the payment later fails, the successful payment (teal in color) will switch to a failed payment (red in color) in the Posted Transactions section of the student’s billing account to show as a failed payment and the previously fronted funds will be removed from your account to cover the amount of the failed payment. You will also see both the deposited and removed funds related to the payment reflected in your Deposits Report.

Manual/Offline Payments

Many programs offer more flexibility around accepting payments and may choose to let parents pay in cash, check, or potentially through a 3rd party credit card processing system. Any of these external payments can be logged in brightwheel to keep an up-to-date record of a student’s account balance. 

Once you have received a payment from a parent, administrators can log this transaction in the student’s billing account page by following the steps below:

  1. Navigate to the student’s Billing Account page

  2. Choose Record an Offline Payment from the Select an Action drop-down

  3. Enter the amount paid, the payer, payment method, the date paid, and any additional information you would like recorded

  4. Click Add Payment

This payment will immediately post to the student’s account and will display as a negative amount in the transaction history indicating that it has reduced the total amount owed. 

Please Note: Logging an offline payment is strictly for tracking purposes. Any checks or cash payments will still need to be deposited at your financial institution. These payments do not appear in brightwheel's Deposit Report.

Void Offline Payments

Brightwheel allows administrators the option to Void offline payments. This is particularly useful in situations where a check fails to clear or a payment was logged incorrectly. To void an offline payment:

  1. Navigate to Posted transactions section of the student's billing profile

  2. Locate the payment and hover your mouse over the payment until the Actions dropdown appears and click Void payment

  3. Confirm your action in the pop-up

The offline payment will be updated in the Posted Transactions section of the student's account to show that it has been voided to help maintain data integrity.
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Subsidies

Subsidy management in brightwheel is always improving. There are currently 4 main options when tracking subsidy payments: 

Option 1

Only charge the parent's co-pay as a recurring charge and track state payments using another system.

Option 2

Charge the parent's co-pay as a recurring charge and add a discount for the amount the state pays and track state payments using another system.

Option 3

Add a recurring charge for the subsidy payment and a recurring charge for the parent's co-pay. 

Once the state payment has been received, record an offline payment.* 

*Please Note: The state agency will need to be added as a parent on the student account (do not add contact information). 

Option 4

Charge the parent's co-pay as a recurring charge.

Once the state payment has been received, record a one-time charge and immediately record an offline payment for the same amount.

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