How a financial ledger and invoicing save time and ensure accuracy for after school teams

Whether you’re running a program with 800 or 85,000 students, clear, accurate financial processes are essential for driving program success.

Ensuring families are satisfied and the program’s numbers are accurate may seem basic on the surface, but it requires thoughtful processes to manage complex financial arrangements at scale.

To unpack this further, our customer success team recently met with Arux users to deepen their knowledge of our child care account ledger.

In this post, we will explore this topic through the lens of our platform, Arux. However, the main takeaway is that these principles should be the primary focus of today's modern child care programs.

Understanding ledger systems (from someone who’s not an accountant)

Dollars in, and dollars out. A financial ledger is a central record for an organization to record just that. Think of it as a notebook that tracks every transaction.

The ledger in Arux organizes transactions into distinct categories: deposits, deductions, refunds, adjustments, convenience fees, and account credits. Each entry displays essential information, including whether it is a credit (invoice) or debit (payment), date, amount, and type of transaction. Again, the goal is to make it easy to see how money flows in and out of the business.

Now, for your after school program, imagine having a complete ledger as part of your financial setup, integrated within the same software you use for enrollments and attendance. An integrated child care account ledger that records every financial event end-to-end, including invoices, adjustments (such as additional fees or credits), and transactions (payments, refunds, returned payments, and chargebacks), specifically at the account level. This enables accurate billing, reconciliation, and reporting without relying on external platforms or unnecessary sync steps.⁠

A snapshot of the child care account ledger in Arux.

Why we built the child care account ledger

Arux’s child care account ledger system tracks the ongoing financial balance between your program and each family, much like a traditional accounting ledger. Every transaction appears here, making it easy to verify account accuracy. Additionally, within the ledger, a payment or adjustment can display as “Not Posted” or “Deferred”:

• Not posted: An adjustment (automated or one-off) that hasn’t pulled into an invoice.

• Deferred: The payment has been collected, but you want to defer the revenue to a later date.

A payment, adjustment, or refund can be either deferred until a specified date or, if no date is indicated, will apply to the next invoice. These items are not included in the account balance or posted to the account until it has been invoiced.

Through Arux, we often see that after school teams defer registration fees until the school year begins, provided they prefer that the registration fees and associated payments fall within the fiscal year to which the registration fee applies.

When invoices are run, Arux automatically allocates payments to appropriate budget codes based on invoiced amounts, so there’s no guesswork about where the money goes. Organizations can set budget codes for unique programs, or even specific to fees like late payments and late pickups.

Invoicing for care: why we recommend it

Streamlining how programs invoice for care creates significant value for admin teams and families. Benefits for families 

Invoicing enables families to set their scheduling preferences — within district parameters — well in advance, allowing them to enroll for an entire year of programming at once without having to pay for all of it at that time. This also allows families to make approval-based schedule change requests throughout the year and have their invoice amounts adjusted automatically.

Within invoicing, families also love the ability to make a single payment (using Auto Pay if they prefer) for multiple kids, even if they have unique schedule types.

Benefits for the district

There are so many variables that go into invoicing families for the right amount, and Arux calculates all of them for you. Arux generates mass invoices based on each individual’s contract rates (monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly) and discounts associated with those contracts at the cadence of your choosing. This method enables a running tally of charges, accommodating additional fees and credits, such as late payment and pickup fees, or snow day credits, for example.

Only posted items appear in the account balance, meaning adjustments and fees remain deferred (and out of sight of parents) until they’re included in an invoice. Once you generate an invoice for a given period, the contract for that timeframe is locked (for now), preventing accidental changes and ensuring clarity and consistency. 

And finally, running a mass invoice on Arux takes just minutes.

An example invoice for care within Arux, showing previous and current account activities.

Best practices for season transitions

Moving from one season to the next, such as summer to the school year, can create financial confusion if not managed carefully. Use audit tools to identify uninvoiced fees or adjustments, and consider mass invoicing outstanding items before the transition. Always verify contracts for any uninvoiced dates before starting a new billing cycle. To help catch items between seasons, Arux will transition all balances from previous seasons into the next invoice.

For Arux users, we recommend meeting with our customer success team to learn how to best routinely audit for uninvoiced schedule dates and uninvoiced events, such as non-school days or drop-in days, etc.

The next step: auto pay

In a recent blog, we covered auto pay and how it can improve payment reliability in after school programs. Once invoices go out, having the ability to apply or require auto pay for ongoing program payments creates a relatively smooth process from invoicing to payment collection.

A child care account ledger, invoicing for care, and enabling auto-pay - can this be a reality within your program?

Whew. We covered a lot of financial ground there. Not bad from a marketer, huh? 😅

However, I hope that through it all, you saw the benefits of a fully integrated financial system, including a child care account ledger, invoicing, integrated payment processing, and auto pay.

Again, it’s why we built it all into our platform — it can help before and after care programs run operationally like the businesses they are. 

Let’s chat for 15 minutes about how we can assist the financial operations in your program.