Better fee rules and other financial improvements

Fee rules let you set up conditions that automatically trigger a fee when a student enrolls in a course. You can target them at things like enrollments, audits, campuses, custom info, and so on.

Handy as they are, fee rules haven't always proved flexible enough to target complex situations. It was pretty difficult, for example, to make a fee trigger when students in the Graduate program enrolled in LIT576 at either the Springfield Campus or the Urbana Campus—such either/or situations required multiple fees with different rules.

Our new fee rules (just released last night!) handle these situations with aplomb. Rules now exist within rule groups; you can have multiple rule groups for each fee. Rule groups include an "any/all" selector that lets you specify your conditions with greater clarity. If you use multiple rule groups, you can easily set up conditions that bill students who "all fit this situation and either this or that other situation". That means it's now simple to set up a fee that triggers when an Undergraduate student enrolls in 1 to 18 credits at either the Portland Campus or the Online Campus (like the above image).

In addition to rule groups, we've added new rules that let you distinguish between all of a student's enrolled units and those enrolled units that match your other conditions. To learn more, check out our detailed Knowledge Base article that describes how fees work.

Here are some of the other financial improvements we've released in the recent weeks and months...

Improved financial dashboard summary

The student's financial dashboard summary is now headlined by a big fat Make a Payment button that shows the student's amount due (plus any overdue amount). Upcoming payment due dates (whether for invoices or payment plans) are clearly lined out together with any pending financial aid payments.

Invoice due dates

Lots of people asked for this: you can now edit invoice due dates! Just go to the invoice's info page and click the pencil next to the due date in the right column.

Recurring payment management

Last May we added the ability to set up recurring donations and payments. A recent updated gives you more options for managing those payments. You can now change the amount, schedule, and payment details on both the payer's profile and the Recurring Payments/Donations reports.