The monthly reckoning: three questions, one list

Question 1: who attended?

The answer should come from the schedule, not from memory. Every fixed lesson in the period is either marked or unmarked, and the unmarked ones are your to-do list.

Use the same five outcomes every time: held, no-show and charged, no-show with notice, cancelled by the teacher, make-up lesson. Mark them the same week if you can. A few weeks later, nobody remembers whether the pupil was sick that week or the week before, and that's when the guessing starts.

Question 2: who's owed a make-up lesson?

This shouldn't be a judgment call in October. It should follow from rules you set before the term started: whether cancelling with notice earns a make-up lesson at all, how many can be earned per month or term, and how many days a make-up lesson stays valid.

Once the rules are written down, the answer is mechanical: every no-show with notice either earned a make-up lesson, or the line states why it didn't — the cap was reached, or the plan doesn't offer make-ups. Lessons you cancel yourself are a separate case: they should never be charged, and on a term plan they should earn a make-up lesson that doesn't expire.

Question 3: what does each family owe?

If the first two questions are answered with dated lines, this is pure addition: lessons and fees charged, minus payments, plus any adjustments. The balance should never be typed in by hand — the moment it is, the number exists in two places, and they start to drift apart.

Treat it like a bank statement: one line per event, a running balance after each line. Then you can answer "what do we owe now?" without calculating, and "why?" by pointing.

The attendance log and the invoice are the same list

The most common source of errors is that attendance is logged in one place and money in another. A lesson that gets rescheduled then gets marked in one list and invoiced from the other.

Keep one list of dated events per family — lessons, charges, payments, adjustments — and let both the attendance overview and the account statement be views of that same list. Then they can't drift apart, because there's only one.

Ten minutes, once a month

1. Go through unmarked lessons for the period and mark them.
2. Log the payments that have come in, with the date the money arrived.
3. Review the make-up lessons: who has credit owed, and is anything about to expire?
4. Send the account statement to families who owe something.
5. Correct any errors with a new, dated line and a reason — never by editing an old one.