You’re gearing up to open registration for your epic summer camp program and next season’s classes at your swim school, gymnastics gym or dance studio. On top of planning the promotion of your new offerings, curriculum and schedule, you want to make sure you’ve got the logistics of posting and processing tuition fees ironed out as well.

The thought of discounting and prorating tuition can feel overwhelming if you are still manually posting tuition fees. That’s why we’ve come up with this easy-to-follow guide so you can maximize your program’s tuition revenue while also offering discounts to families when posting tuition.

What is discounting and prorating

First things first. You may be asking yourself, ‘What exactly is discounting and prorating?’ and you’re not alone. Let’s break them down separately.

Discounting is a reduction made from the gross value of something. In this case, it’s the tuition fees for your classes.

When you prorate, you’re dividing fees in a proportional way based on time. Just think – this is the amount you deduct for a student enrolling late in the billing cycle or when your facility is closed for a holiday.

Whether it’s a flat five-dollar discount or you want to prorate classes based on the number of Mondays your facility is open during the month, chances are a lot more manual effort goes into calculating your overall tuition fee structure than you realize.

At Jackrabbit Class, we know that automation is a blessing. That’s why we’ve made it easy for you to set parameters on how and when classes should be discounted or prorated automatically so that the appropriate tuition fees are billed to families each month!

The Jackrabbit team put together a 4-step billing process to follow so you can simplify your billing process, starting with considerations like how often you want to bill and when you want to offer discounts. Take me to the 4-step Tuition Billing Process Hub now!

When should I offer discounts on classes?

Your decision to prorate classes is a pretty black and white choice. Offering discounts, on the other hand, comes with a lot of gray areas.

There are many different types of discounts you can choose for your gym, dance studio, or swim school. The most common discounts we see at Jackrabbit are:

• Multi-class: a discount for participating in multiple classes
• Multi-student: a discount for having multiple students from the same family enrolled in classes at your facility
• Family: a discount specific to a family or families at your program, separate from multi-student discounts
• Additional: Additional discounts to families meeting post tuition fee criteria

If you’re having an IDK moment, I get it! Too many options can be overwhelming.

As the owner of your activity center, you have the ability to decide which discounting rules get set. It’s absolutely fine to take the less is more route if that’s where you feel more comfortable. After all, you never want to end up in the business of over-discounting the services you provide!

Second in importance to establishing your program’s tuition strategy is making sure discounting and prorating rules are set up to automatically calculate as tuition fees are posted. Because no money gets saved when your staff has to sit and manually enter tuition fees, am I right?

If you’re looking to improve the way you post and process tuition with discounting and prorating considered, check out the latest webinar with our resident training expert as she reviews the ins and outs of all things related to tuition.

How to start offering discounts on tuition

Discounts are great when they are done right! So whether you purchased an activity center and inherited their pricing structure, or you want to extend a deeper discount to a select segment of students at your facility – there’s a solution for when and how to offer discounts at your dance studio, gymnastics gym, or swim school.

If you’re ready to start discounting and prorating your upcoming summer camps and a new session of classes with the power of class management software, there’s no better time to start a trial with Jackrabbit Class.

Start your 30-day trial on us today!

Already a client of Jackrabbit Class? Team up with our support champions to streamline your billing process with more automation with a 30-minute checkup call! (—>Schedule your call now)