Billing Plans and Enrollments

A billing plan is a reusable price template; an enrollment attaches a student to one of those plans. Together they let Trio generate invoices automatically instead of building them by hand each cycle.

Manage both from your billing dashboard using the Plans and Enrollments tabs.

The Plans Tab

The Plans tab lists every billing plan in your studio with its name, type, amount, details, and status. Click Create Plan to add one, then fill in the Plan Name, Type, amount, Lesson Duration, and any type-specific fields.

Plan Types

Subscription - a fixed monthly tuition charge. It is billed in advance on the monthly invoices: each monthly billing run adds that month's tuition for every active subscription to the family's invoice. Runs happen on the 1st automatically once you turn on Create and send monthly invoices on the 1st on the Automation tab, or on demand from the Invoices tab. Each invoice is due the number of days after the run set in Monthly Invoices on the Automation tab. See Billing Automation.
Package - a prepaid bundle of lessons. Set a Lesson Count and an optional expiry in days.
Per Lesson - billed for each lesson taken. The previous month's lessons are gathered onto the monthly invoices in arrears by the same monthly billing run.

Pay to book

A per-lesson plan can bill at booking instead. When a family or a teacher books a single lesson on that plan, Trio creates the lesson, a one-line invoice, and a payment hold in one step. The lesson shows on your calendar with an Awaiting payment chip and the deadline until the family pays.

If the family has autopay with a card or wallet, Trio charges it at once and confirms the booking.
Otherwise the family gets a pay-to-confirm notice with the deadline (the plan's hold hours, or one hour before the lesson, whichever comes first). The pay page takes card and wallet only; bank transfers are not offered because they settle after the deadline.
When the deadline passes unpaid, Trio voids the invoice, cancels the lesson with no makeup credit, and tells both the family and the teacher the time is open again.
To keep the lesson without payment, open it on the calendar and choose Confirm without payment. The hold clears and the invoice stays open like any other per-lesson invoice.
Cancelling a held lesson before it is paid voids the invoice and issues no makeup credit. A paid lesson follows your normal cancellation policy.

Recurring lessons, group lessons, and makeup bookings are never held; the monthly run bills them as usual.

Each plan also has an optional Cancellation Policy. Leave it on "Studio default" to use your studio-wide rule, or pick a specific policy to attach to that plan. See Cancellation Policies for how the policy is chosen when a lesson is cancelled.

Plans can be archived from the Actions menu when you stop offering them; archived plans no longer appear when enrolling students.

The Enrollments Tab

The Enrollments tab attaches plans to students. Each row shows the student, plan, type, amount, start and end dates, and status. Use the Show filter to view Active and Paused, a single status, or All enrollments.

Click Set Billing Plan to open the enrollment dialog. Select a Student and an active Billing Plan, choose a Start Date, and optionally an End Date. Enrolling a student in a Package plan creates a due invoice for the package price right away, so the prepaid lessons are billed up front.

For a Package enrollment the Balance column shows the projection - for example "6 left · 5 scheduled" means six prepaid lessons remain and five of them are already booked on the calendar. When the booked lessons will use up the package, the row also shows the date it runs out. An Unpaid purchase chip means the package's invoice is still open; click it to open that invoice.

Families buying their own packages

Families see the same balance on their Billing page and dashboard, with a Buy another package button that is highlighted when the balance is low. Buying creates a new enrollment on the same plan, starting today with the plan's expiry, sends the package invoice to the family, and lands them on the pay page. Studio owners and admins get a "Package purchased" notice in their inbox. The family's current package keeps being used first; the new one is only drawn on after it runs out. If the family already has an unpaid package invoice for that plan, the button opens that invoice instead of creating another.

Family package purchases are on by default. To turn them off, or to change when a balance counts as low, use the Packages settings on the Automation tab - Let families buy a new package themselves and Warn when a package has this many lessons left (see Billing Automation). When purchases are off, the button disappears from the family's pages.

A student can hold more than one active enrollment at once - for example a piano subscription and a violin subscription, or a repurchased lesson pack. Each enrollment shows as its own row and its own badge on the family page. If you pick a plan the student is already enrolled in, Trio warns you before you continue, since a duplicate of the same plan is usually a mistake.

For an active or paused enrollment, the Actions menu lets you:

Edit dates - change the enrollment's start or end date. Changing the start date affects which lessons and periods get billed, so Trio asks you to confirm before saving; invoices that were already generated are not adjusted.
Pause - temporarily stop billing for that student
Resume - restart a paused enrollment
Cancel - end the enrollment permanently

How Plans Drive Invoices

When invoices are generated - automatically on a schedule, or on demand from the Automation tab - Trio walks every active enrollment and creates one invoice per family covering all of that family's students. Line items reflect each plan's pricing and, for per-lesson plans, the lessons in the billing period. See Billing Automation for the full picture.

Recurring Fees and Rates and Fees

Two related tabs cover charges that are not plans:

Recurring Fees - studio fees such as registration, recital, or materials charges. Each fee has an amount, a Scope (per student or per family), a Frequency (annual, semi-annual, quarterly, monthly, or one-time), an assessment month and day, and a waiver window for recently enrolled families.

The list shows your active fees by default. Set Show to All to include fees you have deactivated, and use the Status badge to turn a fee off or back on. Turning a fee off stops new charges from being added, but any charges already recorded and not yet invoiced stay on the books and will appear on families' next invoices. If there are any, Trio tells you how many and for how much before you confirm, and offers to waive them instead. Deleting a fee that has never been assessed to anyone removes it outright; once a fee has been assessed, deleting it hides it instead, so existing assessments and invoices stay intact. Trio tells you which will happen before you confirm.

Every fee assessment has one of three states:
- Pending - recognized and owed, but not yet on an invoice.
- Assessed - billed on an invoice, or settled outside Trio. An invoice-backed assessment shows its invoice number.
- Waived - not owed. Fees for recently enrolled families are waived automatically inside the waiver window.
Recording a fee and billing it are separate steps. Trio recognizes fees when they come due and marks them Pending; "Assess Now" on a fee does the same thing for a period you choose. The Period list offers only the periods that fee's own schedule would produce, from when you created it through the current month, so an annual August fee offers Augusts and a quarterly fee offers its four due months. Use it to catch up a period that has not been recorded yet. A pending fee is then billed one of two ways: it is swept onto the next invoice you create from Generate Invoices, or you select it on the manual New Invoice page, where a family's unbilled fees appear as a checklist. Because of this, a studio that never generates invoices will collect pending fees rather than billing them automatically.

The fee's Assessment History shows which family (and student, for per-student fees) each charge belongs to and can be filtered by period. A pending assessment can be waived or marked settled (for a fee paid in cash or outside Trio); a waived one can be unwaived to return it to Pending. Each action asks you to confirm and lets you record an optional reason. To stop billing a fee that is already on an invoice, remove its line item from that invoice, which returns it to Pending, then waive it. Each family's detail page also lists that family's fee assessments from the last 12 months with the same states. Assessments belonging to a deleted fee stop appearing there and are never billed.
Rates and Fees (owners and admins) - your studio's default lesson rates by duration, tax rate, and late-fee amount. These defaults feed auto-generated invoices, so set them up to keep pricing consistent.