End of the month in the administration: the fee spreadsheet is opened, the attendance register is cross-referenced, meals are counted, agreed reductions from September are applied, and everything is double-checked three times before issuing invoices. Just two children with reduced hours and a week of absence due to illness can cause discrepancies.
Let’s see what a fee in a 0-6 service really looks like, what calculation models exist, where the spreadsheet fails, and how invoices can be generated automatically.
A fee is not a number, it is a sum of items
On the brochure, the fee seems like a single amount: "350 euros per month". In practice, that amount is the sum of different items, each with its own logic and frequency:
- Fixed rate — the basic educational service, the same every month regardless of attendance days.
- Registration fee — a one-time fee at the beginning of the educational year, often with different amounts for new enrollees and for renewals.
- Meals — per meal consumed or a flat rate, with snacks sometimes included and sometimes separate.
- Extended hours — leaving at 5 PM or 6 PM, early entry, Saturday opening.
- Reductions — for the second child, agreements with the municipality or a company, individual agreements with families, discounts for prolonged absence.
Each item behaves differently: some are stable, others change daily based on what happens in the section. This is where the complexity arises, not from the math.
Why the spreadsheet breaks when variables increase
A spreadsheet works perfectly as long as all enrolled children pay the same fixed fee and attend in the same way. It fails badly when vertical and horizontal part-time arrangements come in, siblings with reductions, agreements with their own amounts, mid-month enrollments, and early withdrawals.
The breaking point is not the number of children: it is the number of combinations. With fifteen children and five types of attendance, the rows to check manually become more than the available hours. And the errors are always the same: the formula dragged down one row too few, the new enrollee added outside the range, the file opened by two people simultaneously, the reduction remembered by only one colleague.
The real cost is not the incorrect invoice. It is the time spent double-checking, the phone call from the family contesting the amount, and the fact that the memory of how the fee is calculated resides in the mind of just one person.
The five ways to calculate an amount
In Easy.School, each facility configures its own product catalog, that is, the list of services it invoices. Each product has a type, and the type determines how the amount is calculated:
- Fixed amount — the figure is always the same. Suitable for the monthly fee of the educational service, the registration fee, and insurance.
- Per attendance — the unit amount is multiplied by the days actually attended. This is the model for consumption services and irregular attendance.
- Per meal — counts the lunches and snacks recorded, not the days. A child present only in the morning does not pay for the lunch they did not consume.
- By time slot — reads the entry and exit times and assigns the amount of the corresponding time slot. This is the clean way to manage extensions and late exits.
- Discount for absence — subtracts an amount for each day the child is absent, according to the rule set by the facility.
The choice between these models is not a technical matter: it is a pricing policy decision. Deciding whether meals are paid per meal or at a flat rate, and whether absence counts for a discount or not, means deciding how predictable your income is and how predictable expenses are for families.
Attendance is the data that supports all calculations
Three out of five models depend on what actually happened in the section. For this reason, daily attendance recording is not a task separate from accounting: it is its foundation. Entry and exit times, meals, snacks, and naps are recorded daily by educators, and from there the calculation feeds itself without re-copying.
The advantage is twofold. The administration no longer has to transcribe the paper register at the end of the month, and when a family requests clarification on an amount, the answer is verifiable: that day the exit was at 5:20 PM, so the time slot is that one. If you want to delve deeper into how daily recording works, we discuss it in App for attendance at the nursery.
From products to packages: invoices that generate themselves
Products are assigned to individual children, with the possibility of applying an individual discount. This is where exceptions live: the second child, the corporate agreement, the agreement made with a family in November. The exception remains recorded in the child's file, not in a note on the side of the sheet.
Packages take the next step: they group multiple products and associate them with a list of children. For each package, you establish the billing cycle (one-time, weekly, monthly), the day documents are generated, the type of document, and the payment method. From then on, invoices are created automatically, with amounts already calculated based on the attendance of the period.
The work of the administration changes: from "filling out invoices" to "checking invoices". The bulk of the effort shifts just once, when you configure products and packages at the beginning of the year.
After issuance: collections, statuses, and electronic invoicing
The document has its own cycle: draft, invoice, receipt, pro forma. The document status and the SDI status remain tracked separately, so you always know if a problem concerns the collection or transmission. Sending to the SDI starts directly from the management software.
Collections are recorded by indicating the payment method, and the status updates automatically: unpaid, partially paid, paid. Knowing at any moment which fees are still open makes the difference between a timely reminder and a chase in March. Around the document, you find VAT rates, cost centers assignable even to individual lines, customizable invoice deadlines, and credit notes.
Families, for their part, see invoices, receipts, and pro forma directly from the Easy Family app: fewer requests for copies via email and fewer lost documents.
Reports, fee declarations, and year-end closure
The moment you realize whether the calculations have been kept in order all year is spring, when families request the fee declaration for their tax returns. If the data is already in the system, the declaration is produced from there, along with annual reports and those for each child, with mass document downloads when needed to deliver everything at once.
These are also the numbers that the coordinator needs to think about the following year: how much the meals really cost, how much the extended hours yield, how much absences impact the facility's budget. We have also written about the overall picture of economic management in Software for managing nursery fees.
In summary
A fee is the sum of items with different logics: fixed amounts, attendance calculations, meal counts, time slots, discounts for absence. As long as the combinations are few, the spreadsheet holds; when they grow, the administration's time goes into checks. Configuring products with their calculation type, grouping them into packages, and linking them to daily recorded attendance simplifies the work and gives you back the end-of-month hours.
Do you want to see how to configure the fees for your facility? Try Easy.School for free.
