Does your school invite guest lecturers to speak on campus and enrich the curriculum? If yes, it’s a great strategy to keep sessions lively and stimulating, but with it comes the responsibility to oversee attendance and provide for costs in a timely manner since you’ve got to pay for the lecturers’ hourly salary as well as expenses like travel and lodging. 💸

Knowing this, Full Fabric created a page where you can input the fees and expenses of your lecturers and approve or reject the resulting cost based on whether or not the lecturer showed up and performed their duties. That information can then be sent directly to your accounting software via API, allowing you to complete the transaction. 🙌 Continue reading to learn more!

Where can I find the "Lecturer costs" page?

Every session from every course has its own dedicated page of lecturer costs, but there is also a global list of lecturer costs where you can get a comprehensive overview spanning every program, class, and course.

How to access the global list of lecturer costs

1) Click Academics on the sidebar
2) Choose the option Lecturer costs

Here's a demonstration of the list:

As you can see, due to being a global list, there are filters at the top to help you narrow down the data to exactly what you need:

Most of the filters are self-explanatory, but four might require some explaining:

Lecturer cost filter – The status of the cost. The available options are: All, No costs, Has a cost but missing approval, Costs are approved, Costs are rejected.
Lecturer attendance filter – The status of the attendance. The available options are: All, Lecturer attendance missing, Lecturer present, Lecturer absent.
Budget codes – A unique number used for budgetary reporting. You can either select one or more of the existing codes, pick the option Budget code missing, or leave the default All.
Payment method – Which method will or has been used to cover a specific fee or expense. The options are based on the payment methods supported by the school, and you can also select more than one.

The columns in the list are discussed in the section How can I introduce costs and approve or reject lecturer costs?

How to access the lists of lecturer costs for a particular session

1) Click Academics on the sidebar and choose Calendar to open the academic calendar

2) Enter the relevant course and navigate to the tab Sessions
3) Click the gear ahead of the desired session to go inside it

4) Lastly, once inside the session, proceed to the tab Costs

The list of session costs is practically identical to the global list of lecturer costs, as you can see below:

As indicated earlier, we'll discuss the columns in the list and what to do with them in the next topic.

How can I introduce costs and approve or reject lecturer costs?

This is the overall process:

1) If you haven’t already, begin by creating a course and adding sessions to it
2) Enter a session by following the instructions in the previous section and add the pertinent lecturers and guest lecturers under Details
3) Go to the Lecturer costs a.k.a. Costs page as already described; it will be pre-populated with the lecturers defined for the session

Now let’s take a moment to observe the columns in the table now:

NAME a.k.a. LECTURER – The name of the lecturers, auto-filled with the lecturers you picked on the session Details tab.
FEES – The agreed salary for delivering the lecture.*
EXPENSES – The reimbursement of various expenses, such as food and accommodation.*

TRANSPORT EXPENSES – Similar to the above, but only for travel.*

*There are two rows of fields for the cost-related columns. The top row is for inserting the values, while the bottom row contains dropdown menus for selecting the respective payment methods.

To save time, if a lecturer has a specific payment method assigned to his or her profile, that payment method will be automatically selected for their fees and expenses.

TOTAL – The total cost, which is automatically calculated based on the previous sums.
COMMENTS – Internal notes to record additional information.
APPROVED/REJECTED a.k.a. COST APPROVAL – Post-session confirmation that everything went as planned, the cost is adequate and the lecturer should be paid as stipulated.

ATTENDANCE – Post-session confirmation that the lecturer attended and gave the lecture. The attendance marker is always disabled until the session end date has passed.

So, knowing this:

1) Before the session, fill in the fees and expenses decided for each lecturer for that particular session, namely who’s gonna cost what (note that the negotiation should happen someplace else, so these are the final figures)
2) Monitor that the session takes place and that the lecturers speak to the class
3) After the session, go back to the list and accordingly approve or reject the payments

To be clear, you should think of the APPROVED or REJECTED ruling as: “This person actually came and did the lecture, so I’m gonna approve the payment. This person didn’t, so I’ll reject the payment.” So it’s very much about attendance and fulfilling the lecturer contract.

On a different point, please note that when a wage is approved or rejected it doesn’t automatically reach your accounting software, because for that to happen the data needs to be retrieved via the API by your IT team first. 🛫

How do I remove a lecturer?

Removing a lecturer is only possible by doing so on the session Details tab, but it’s super simple: just go there, deselect the lecturers and this will automatically sack them from Costs. 😏

However, once a lecturer has costs and they’ve already been submitted (that is, approved or rejected), deleting them is disabled, which is a safety measure to protect your accounting system from getting mixed information, since we don’t know when IT will sync and fetch the data.

How can we activate this feature and set up the API to integrate our accounting software with Full Fabric?

Please get in touch with our Support Team by starting a chat or emailing support@fullfabric.com. 😃

You have reached the end of this article. Thanks for reading! 🤓 If you have any questions or comments on the topic at hand, or if you enjoy reads like this and have article requests, let us know. Also, please leave a rating below. Your feedback is highly appreciated! 💖

PUBLISHED: October 8, 2018
LAST UPDATED: July 14, 2022 at 8:35 a.m.