Your organisation probably has a policy regarding the circumstances in which a missed lesson is forfeited and when it can be credited back to the student or family. Situations to consider are:

  • A student is unwell on the day of the lesson and cannot attend.
  • A student has an injury that prevents them from attending for several weeks.
  • A teacher is unwell and does not give the lesson.
  • A lesson is cancelled due to a public holiday.

Music Monitor has settings that allow you to manage these processes more easily.

In brief, you can set up your Attendance Codes so that they indicate whether an absence warrants a credit back to the student account or not. The process to then apply these credits includes administrator review before confirming the credits.

Attendance Codes

Each Attendance Code has three different settings that can be set on or off:

  • Whether a lesson took place. 
  • Whether staff pay is calculated for the lesson.
  • Whether the student is charged for the lesson.

So you can create Attendance Codes - such as "Teacher Absence", for example -  that do not count towards the billing for that student.

See Set Up Attendance Codes for more detail on this.

To make use of this, you also need to understand how to use Billing Period and Reconciliation Period.

Lessons Billed in Arrears

If you bill your students at the end of a term, after the lessons are given, this attendance code setup makes things very simple. You can simply bill only for the lessons that are marked as being given. More precisely, you're billing for the lessons marked as billable, which may include any missed at short notice or other situations that are marked with a code that still charges the student.

To make use of this, you clearly need your rolls to be marked before you do the billing.

You also need to have reviewed the rolls to ensure they're marked in ways that meet your expectations. It's best to do this review promptly, as the rolls come in, as part of the payroll review process, ensuring that they are reviewed while the information is fresh and can be corrected if needed.

See Billing Tuition in Arrears.

Lessons Billed in Advance

If you bill in advance of the lessons, but also have provision to waive the charge in certain circumstances, you will need to reverse the charge on these occasions.

If this situation is rare enough, you may choose to simply handle each case as a one-off and process credit individually. To do that, you would go to the relevant enrolment record and change the Number of Lessons to "-1", (or another number as required if more credits are to be given) and use the blue Send to Accounts button. That sends a negative charge (that is, a credit) to the student's account, which will reduce their next invoice, or can be refunded - see Write Off or Refund Credit Balances.

But you can also manage these adjustments in bulk at the end of the term. The process Music Monitor has built in allows you to review all the credits to be given and adjust or remove any as required before sending the corrected list over to accounts in one go. See the details at: