Overview

Course Confirmation and Payments allows you to create cycles (templates) to process school fees, other school payment items, agreements and questions for a defined group of students who all need to complete the same combination of items.  You can include a range of payment items and can also have either a set amount or an optional amount for an item listed.

For schools with the Payment Plan feature, there is also the option to allow payment via instalments.

Schools generally use Course Confirmations to collect annual school fees and agreements (i.e. ICT User Agreements, Media Agreements etc) but it can also be used for other cost items such as academies, international camps/excursions, language programs etc.

You can create as many cycles (templates) as you need within each Academic Year to allow for the different student groups i.e. you might have a Year 7-10 Template and then a VCE Template; alternatively you might have a template for each year level at the school.  In Primary Schools, often one template is used for all of the students.

Please Note: Access to CompassPay is required for schools to use the Course Confirmation module.

Permissions

To access, set up and administer Course Confirmation cycles, staff will require the CourseConfAdmin permission.

For information on assigning permissions, please refer to the 'Permissions' article from our Knowledge Base.

Accessing Course Confirmations

The Course Confirmation and Payments administration page is accessed by going to the 'Organisation' menu (grid icon) and clicking on 'Course Confirmation/Payments'.

On the page you will see any existing cycles that have been run at your school across each Academic Year.
     

Templates

Templates allow you to create a payment cycle for a group of students who all need to complete the same batch of items - the same agreements, questions and school fee/payment items.

    

Creating a Course Confirmation Template

A template allows you to define the content of a Course Confirmation cycle that you want to issue to a set group of students.

You can run as many templates as you need within each Target Academic Year.

Please refer to the article 'Creating a Course Confirmation Template' for details on how to set up a standard template.

If you are wanting the template to include Per-Subject charges based on the subjects each student has selected for that year, please refer to the 'Creating a Course Confirmation Template with Per Subject Charges' article from our Knowledge Base.

For details on what Per-Subject charges are, please see the below section.

Editing a Template

To edit an existing Template, locate the template on the Course Confirmation page (under the Organisation menu) and click the template title.

This will take you into the template and you can then access a series of tabs.  Once you have made any changes, please click 'Save' at the bottom of the template to update the cycle.
     

Please Note: Any changes you make to a template that has been already set as 'Open to Parents' will have an impact on any students enrolled in the cycle who may have already processed the Course Confirmation or who are part way through the process so please proceed with caution.

For details on the content of each tab, please refer to the 'Creating a Course Confirmation Template' article.

Publishing a Template

Once you are happy with the setup of your template and are ready to allow parents to begin accessing this Course Confirmation online through Compass, click into the applicable template and tick the 'Open to Parents' option on the 'Basic Template Information' tab.  Click 'Save' at the bottom of the screen to update the template.

    

This will provide access for parents of the students enrolled in the template cycle to process it either via their Compass parent portal or via the Compass App.  It will also create an alert on the parents' Compass portal/app dashboard to advise them that action is required.
   

     

Per-Subject Charges

When creating a template to issue school fee charges, Course Confirmations allows you to generate specific charges to students based on their individual subject selections for that Target Academic Year i.e. if the cost to participate in the Food Technology elective is $20 and the cost to participate in Outdoor Education is $40, you can import student subject selections so that students in each elective are charged the applicable elective cost within the Course Confirmation template you are issuing to families for school fee payment.

     

If your school does not have associated costs per subject choice, you will not need to enable this option in your template, you will leave the box unticked.

For information on how to set per subject charges and import student selections, please refer to the 'Importing Subject Selections' article.

For information on creating a template that includes per subject charges, please refer to the 'Creating a Course Confirmation Template with Per Subject Charges' article from our Knowledge Base.

Please Note: Each Target Academic Year in Course Confirmations will only retain one single imported file containing student subject selections.  As such, per subject charges should only be enabled within a template once per Target Academic year, per student. If a student has been added to multiple templates within one Target Academic year and the per-subject charges are enabled in more than one of those templates, the student would be charged the associated subject fees on each template occurance.

Conditions

A template can have 'Conditions' applied which must be met before the parent can proceed to process the Course Confirmation cycle. 
By default when a 'condition' is created in a template all students are set to 'Not Completed' for that condition. Until the condition has been marked as 'completed', parents will not be able to complete the Course Confirmation process.

For details on adding conditions to templates, please refer to the 'Creating a Course Confirmation Template' article.

To mark a student as having completed a condition, select the condition from the drop down menu beside the relevant Template from the Course Confirmation dashboard. 
     

This will then display the Condition Check-Off Page which includes a list of all of the students included in the cycle.
     

Beside each of students is a tick box and when selected this indicates that they have completed that condition.

There is a range of buttons at the bottom of this screen which allows you to bulk tick or untick students as completed (in some instances it may be more efficient to tick all students as completed and then untick the few students who are outstanding).

    

To update a few students, locate them within the list and tick the associated box for each student.  Click 'Save Changes'.

Alternatively you can use:

Check All Above - this will tick all students listed on the page you are viewing
Uncheck All Above - this will untick all students listed on the page you are viewing
Check All - this will tick all students listed
Uncheck All - this will untick all students listed

Ensure to click 'Save Changes' as you go.

You can use the arrows to click between pages; likewise you can use the options in the dropdown for 'Page size' to exand the list of students being viewed.

Parent Completion of a Course Confirmation Cycle

Please Note: For students with a Primary and an Alternate household, parents from both households will be able to see and access the Course Confirmation cycles pertaining to the student.  Once one of the parents have processed it, the Course Confirmation cycle will show as completed in both parent's portals.

 

They need to click into the title of the Course Confirmation that they want to process.  In the cycle, they will be prompted to first complete any agreements and questions that have been set up in the template. If the 'Parent to sign' or 'Student to sign' box has been ticked, the parent will be prompted to digitally sign the agreements.

Once all agreements and questions have been completed the parent will then be asked to pay for the Template-Wide charges and any Per-Subject charges (if these have been included in the template).

For 'Locked' payment items the parents must pay the 'Recommended' amount, however for payment items that are not 'Locked', the parent will have the ability to type into the text box the amount that they wish to pay for these items.

Once the parent has determined the fees that they are going to pay they select 'Pay and Finalise' to complete the payment online. 

Alternatively, if 'allow offline completion' was enabled for the template, they can click the 'Pay in person at the school' link to print off a summary of the items and amount for payment which can be used by the school for reference when parents pay directly at the office (please see the next section of this article 'Processing Offline Payments' further below for more details).

     

     

If the template has been set up to allow payment via instalments, the parent will see the 'Pay in Instalments' option.
If they want to pay for the total amount at once, they will click 'Pay Now' to complete the process.

If they want to take up the instalment option, they will need to click 'Pay in Instalments'.  This will open a pop-up showing them the instalment dates.  They then click 'Confirm' to proceed.

     

Please Note: If a parent is processing payment after one or more of the instalment dates have passed, when processing payment the parent will be charged immediately for the total of all passed instalments.  They will then be charged the remaining instalments as scheduled.

Please Note: If a parent wants to pay via a custom instalment plan, they will need to contact the office.  Staff can set up the individual plan in the 'Payment Plans' module (for details please refer to the 'Payment Plans' article from our Knowledge Base) and then they will update the student's status in the Course Confirmation template to 'Manual Payment' (please refer to the below section in this article re Course Confirmation Status settings).

Course Confirmation Status

As families complete their Course Confirmation in Compass the status column on the 'Selected Student' tab of the template updates to indicate where the parent is up to in the process. Once the status changes to 'Completed' the notification on the dashboard for parents will be removed.

     

Status Types

Not Started	The Course Confirmation has not been opened/viewed.
In Progress	Parent has started the Course Confirmation cycle but has not completed it.
Awaiting Payment	Parent has worked through the cycle to the final payment stage but not yet proceeded to make payment.
Awaiting Manual Payment	Parent has opted to pay manually at the office and downloaded the summary form.
Complete	Payment is complete; this status is automatically set if the parent opts to pay online.  It can also be manually set as the parent's status by staff if the payment has been received manually.
*Complete via Payment Plan	Parent has chosen to pay using instalments and completed their payment details.

*This status is only possible for schools who have the Payment Plan feature enabled in their portal AND the option enabled for the specific template.

Adjusting the Status

Staff are able to edit the status for a student (or multiple students) but please be advised this will potentially impact what requires action by the parent.

To change a status, select the applicable student/students.  Then select from the dropdown the status you would like to update the selected students to.
     

Click 'Selected' to apply the set status to the selected students.  The applicable students will have their status updated.

     

If you need to update the status of all enrolled students, choose the applicable status in the 'Set Status' dropdown and then click 'All'.

     

Please Note: Before updating any student's status, please refer to the potential effect the change could have per the details provided.
     

 

Processing Offline Payments

Viewing Payment Details

To view payment details for a student, locate them in the list on the 'Selected Students' tab within a template and click the icon to expand the details.
     

Exporting Course Confirmation Data

To export student Course Confirmation details, go to the Course Confirmations page (under the Organisation menu).

     


Agreements and Questions
To export responses parents provide to Additional Questions included in a template, click into the applicable template and on to the 'Agreements and Questions' tab.

Click 'Additional Questions Report' and the file will download to your device.