Billing Plans and Enrollments
By Trio Team · Updated
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 statement: when you generate a statement for a month, each active subscription adds that month's tuition to the family's invoice. Invoices are generated on demand from the Invoices tab - Trio does not create them on its own.
- 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 statement in arrears.
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.
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:
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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.
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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.