A Family Account is a single, per-family view of everything they’ve been billed and everything they’ve paid — with a running balance and a tidy statement you can share. It’s the page to open when a parent asks “what do I owe?” or “can you send me a summary?”
Where it lives
Family Accounts sits inside the Billing & Finance group in the left sidebar.
| Looking for | Where it is |
|---|---|
| A family’s account and balance | Billing & Finance → Family Accounts |
| One family’s full statement | Family Accounts → open that family |
Who can see this Family Accounts is a finance view — owners and anyone with a finance role can open it. Teachers without billing permissions won't see it.
What’s on a family’s account
Open a family and you’ll see their whole billing story in one place:
- Every invoice raised for that family, in whichever of the nine money states it’s in — Draft, Sent, Collecting, Paid, Part-paid, Overdue, Void or Written off. See what each invoice status means.
- Every payment recorded against them — card, Direct Debit, cash or bank transfer.
- A running balance, so you can tell at a glance whether they’re up to date, in credit, or overdue.
It pulls together what would otherwise be scattered across separate invoices, so you don’t have to add anything up by hand.
Three things you can do from here
Invoice this family. Select Invoice this family to start a billing run already scoped to that household’s active students — the quickest way to bill one family without touching anyone else’s invoices.
Set a family discount. A family can carry a standing Family discount — a percentage, set on this page. It’s applied before VAT to every billing-run invoice raised for that payer from then on. It’s the usual way to run a sibling discount. It is never applied retroactively, so invoices already raised keep the figures they were sent with.
Add an account transaction. Where you need to put something on the account by hand — a goodwill credit, a balance carried over from your old system — you add it here rather than editing an invoice.
Share a statement
When a parent wants a summary — for their own records, an employer, or a grant — you can give them a clean statement of their account rather than forwarding a stack of invoices.
- Go to Billing & Finance → Family Accounts.
- Open the family you want.
- Review the listed invoices and payments and the closing balance.
- Use the statement view to produce a shareable summary for that family.
The statement shows the same figures the parent sees in their portal, so there are no surprises when they come to pay.
How it fits with the rest of billing
Family Accounts is a view, not the place you create charges. The money is made and managed elsewhere:
- Invoices are produced by a billing run, not added here.
- Payments by card or Direct Debit arrive automatically once a parent pays or the collection clears; cash and bank-transfer payments are logged against the relevant invoice.
- To chase what’s overdue, work from the Overdue tab — see Chase overdue invoices.
Think of the Family Account as the read-out: the single screen that tells you, and the parent, exactly where things stand.
Was this out of date or unclear? Tell us — we keep these guides matched to the live app.