Once you've got your payment plans templates all ready to go, the next step is to put them to good use – and aside from being able to apply the templates to the relevant profiles, you can also edit a student's payment plan to make individual changes (like in the event of a unique scholarship with special discounts). There are also ways to automate this process to make it faster and more effective: either through automated workflows or by directly giving applicants the opportunity to

➜ How do I manually create a payment plan?

➜ How can I browse and customize a student payment plan?

➜ How do I set up an automated workflow to create payment plans?

➜ How do I allow candidates to create a payment plan for themselves when applying?

To create a payment plan, follow the instructions below:

     1) Enter a profile
​     2) Click the tab Financials and then Payment plans
​     3) Click the button Add plan
​     4) Fill in the fields:

PRODUCT — Which programme and class the payment plan is intended for.
​PAYMENT PLAN TEMPLATE — Which payment plan template is most appropriate.
​NAME — A name of your own choosing to specifically identify that student's payment plan.

     5) Lastly, click Create plan:

This will automatically migrate the setup of the template to the student's newly created payment plan, including sums and due dates:

If no changes are required, just leave it as is and you're done. However, you can edit the details as necessary, such as to extend a deadline, alter an amount, and so on. Keep on reading to learn the ins and outs of browsing and editing a student payment plan!

Altogether, there are three levels of data to dig through when accounting for someone's payment plans: the payment plans, the fees of the selected payment plan, and the transactions of a given fee. The gear at the end of a row is always a shortcut into the Details tab of the next area, whereas the bulleted list icon firstly transports you to the fees of the plan and then to their transactions.

Starting from the beginning, just access the profile Financials tab to open the student's payment plan list:

Needless to say, not only can you create payment plans here, but also have an overview of existing ones as well as of all of the transactions associated with that particular profile (All transactions). Under Payment plans, four columns, in particular, are of utmost importance where your school's interests are concerned:

STATE — Paid (when the payment plan has been fully paid), 1 payment overdue (or more – when at least one of the fees is still pending after the expiration of the deadline), and Not due (when the next fee's deadline is yet to pass and everything's good so far).
​OUTSTANDING AMOUNT — How much money your school is presently owed (TOTAL AMOUNT minus PAID AMOUNT).
​PAID AMOUNT — How much money has been hitherto paid.
​TOTAL AMOUNT — How much money was originally owed (OUTSTANDING AMOUNT plus PAID AMOUNT).

Barring TOTAL AMOUNT, all of the aforementioned columns will automatically update according to the timings that were set and the transactions recorded by staff.

Following the next "level" in the sequence, let's go inside a payment plan:

Under Details, you can view and/or change the Product and the Name of the payment plan you're visiting. More importantly, you can make it accessible or not accessible to students by pressing Publish payment plan or Unpublish payment plan. Plans are unpublished by default and only shared with the student side when published, which aims to let staff privately work on them until they're ready for release.

The tab Discounts is where you may apply a discount template to the payment plan, or, alternatively, create and apply a personalized discount. It's actually possible to do the same in the Fees tab, but the tab Discounts also serves as a summary of the discounts that have been applied to the respective payment plan.

Notes lets staff add useful commentary about the plan for future reference. For instance: "I added a discount because he was part of an Early Bird campaign". It works the same way as adding notes in the profile Latest activity tab.

In turn, Auditing allows staff to see an audit history of the changes to a profile's payment plan, such as the creation date, when a fee was deleted and more. It features timestamps and the authors of the modifications.

Fees is a bit more complex. The short version is that it's the list of fees belonging to the payment plan you're accessing, where, obviously, you can manage fees:

But let's take a closer look. If you've read the previous article, some of the fields should be recognizable, namely DESCRIPTION, DUE DATE and CURRENCY, all of which you can alter by pressing the gear at the end of a row:

The system runs the other columns:

REFERENCE — A unique code automatically generated by Full Fabric to identify a specific fee.

SUBTOTAL — The pre-discount total.

DISCOUNTS APPLIED — The amount or percentage of the discount (if one exists).

DISCOUNT TOTAL – How much was subtracted by the discount.

TOTAL — The final cost.

STATE — Paid, Not due (if the deadline is after the current date), or Overdue (if the deadline is before the current date).

OUTSTANDING — How much money is left to complete a certain payment.*

PAID — How much has been paid so far.*

*It bears noting that payments can be split into several transactions. So, for instance, supposing a student split the payment into several transactions, they could have paid 400€ out of 500€ and be 100€ in debt.

To add a discount, tap the aptly named Add discount button at the top right-hand corner and determine if you want to SELECT A DISCOUNT TEMPLATE or CREATE A NEW DISCOUNT. If you tick the former, CHOOSE A TEMPLATE and press Create discount:

But if you tick the latter, then fill in the fields:

DESCRIPTION — Succinctly describe or name the discount.

TYPE — Define what type of discount it is, namely:

PERCENTAGE/AMOUNT — Set the value for that discount in accordance with the previous selection.

FEES DISCOUNTED — Select which payment installments should receive the discount. You can have multiple discounts within the same payment plan.

Once you're done, click Create discount. You may have to refresh the page for all of the recent updates to appear:

There's a way to automatically create payment plans for students, and that's by automating a workflow. A workflow is a predetermined sequence of events, comprising a trigger and, optionally, one or more conditions, that are intended to automatically induce a specific action – in this case, the creation of a payment plan. For more information on how automated workflows work, please read this other Help Center article: Automated workflows.

Since a payment plan is an agreement to pay the tuition fees of a class over a certain length of time, the trigger and the conditions for the workflow are similarly class-centric.

The transition from one predetermined lifecycle state to another is always the catalyst. For example:

Conditions are extra requirements that must be met for the payment plan to be created; however, as indicated earlier, their inclusion in the automated workflow is optional. Currently, only one condition may be added: The capacity of the product is, for which you must either choose Below the maximum capacity or Above or equal to the maximum capacity. Barring exceptional circumstances, you should typically skip this step.

Finally, there's the ACTION. Select Create payment plan and pick the most suitable PAYMENT PLAN TEMPLATE.

You'll end up with something like this:

You're essentially trading customization for speed when you set up an automated workflow. It's a much faster and simpler approach that saves you a tremendous amount of time, but because of its standardized nature, every resulting payment plan is an exact replica of the payment plan template. Having said that, you can always make changes to a payment plan after its creation, of course.

Automated payment plan workflows can be built in two places: inside the Automation tab of a specific class or, if you wish to link the workflow to multiple classes, inside the Lifecycle workflow page.

To access the Automation tab of a class:

1) Click the gear in the top right-hand corner and choose General settings

2) Navigate to the tab Institution

3) Enter the appropriate program and class

4) Jump to Automation

To access the Lifecycle workflow page:

1) Click the gear in the top right-hand corner and choose General settings

2) Navigate to the tab Institution

3) Jump to Lifecycle workflow

By the way, to link an automated workflow created in the Lifecycle workflow page to the classes you want it to apply to, just select them in the Details tab:

Application templates may include a Payment plan tab to let applicants select their preferred payment plan for their chosen program and class. The list of available payment plans is based on which payment plan templates were linked to the program and class in question – a process we discuss here.

After linking the pertinent payment plans to the class, follow these three simple steps to activate the Payment plan tab:

1) Open the class's application template

2) Go to the tab Payment plan

3) Tap Disabled to switch the status of the tab to Enabled

When enabled, the tab Payment plan allows staff to provide useful information, such as how to make payments and when to expect invoices (just to mention a few examples), as well as to define whether the payment plan should be automatically published upon the application being submitted and whether or not discounts are accepted:

On the applicant-facing side of Full Fabric, the tab PAYMENT PLAN stays hidden until the applicant selects a program and a class linked to at least one payment plan template:

Once accessible, this is what the PAYMENT PLAN tab looks like:

PUBLISHED: August 21, 2018
​LAST UPDATED: August 9, 2022 at 12:02 a.m.