Fees in PowerSchool

Fees in PowerSchool are generally a manual process, with secretarial staff creating the types of fees they want to apply, and then applying them manually to students in either a group or individually. The following will explain how to create fee types, and how to apply both fees and payments to a student's account.

Fee Types

Fee types are created at the school level and are used whenever you assign a fee to a student. Each fee you assign to a student will need both a type and a description, so you have some leeway on how granular you want your fee types to be. Keep in mind that Fee Types do not have a set value assigned to them, and can be re-used year after year if you prefer, even if fee values change.

To create a Fee Type, go to "School" on the left hand side of the admin portal for PowerSchool, and then select "Fee Types" under the "General" Heading.

On the screen that opens, select "New" and fill in the "Fee Type" and "Fee Type Description" fields with information that adequately describes the fees you want to create. For example, if I were creating a fee type for assigning Grade 9 Enrollment Fees, I might use "Grade 9 Options" for the Fee Type, and then "Options Fees for Grade 9 Students" for the Fee Type Description. Try your best to be descriptive in the "Fee Type" field, since it will show up more often in reports and on student screens. For the "Fee Category" field, select "Student".

NOTE: Once you have created a fee type and assigned it to students, it is very difficult to delete it. Try to make sure your fee types are generic enough that they can be easily re-used and don't need to be recreated every year (i.e. use "Enrollment Fees" rather than "2021-2022 Enrollment Fees")

Repeat these steps for all the various fee types you need.

Assigning Fees to Students

Once you have Fee Types created, you can start assigning them to students. You have two main ways to assign fees to students.

Assigning Fees to a Group of students

First, make a group of students your active student selection in PowerSchool. In the example below, I selected all the grade 9 students in the school.
Once you have your selection, click the down arrow on the bottom right of the student selection and choose "Fee Functions" under "Functions"

On the page that appears, select "New Fee". On the screen that opens, select the appropriate fee type that you created earlier for "Fee Type". "Department" can be left as it is. Change the "Transaction Date" field to be the date you wish the fee to show as being applied to all the students, and enter a description that explains the fee into the "Description" field (i.e. If I were entering the Grade 9 Options Fees for 2021-2022, I might use the description "Grade 9 Options Fees for 2021-2022 School Year"). Enter the cost of the fee into the "Amount of Fee" field. The rest of the fields can be left blank, unless you want to pay the fee for all students simultaneously. Once you've got all the fields populated, hit "Submit" to apply the field to all the students you previously selected.

assigning fees to a single student

To assign fees to a single student, you can either assign the fee using the method above with only one student selected, or you can assign the fee from inside the student's profile in PowerSchool.

To start, select the student, and scroll down the left hand bar to select "Fee Transactions" under the Administration heading. On the screen that opens, select the type of fee you wish to apply from the drop down list that says "Create New Fee". Fill out the details as you did when creating a fee entry for multiple students (shown above).

Marking Payments for Student Fees

Once a fee has been paid, you can mark it off for the individual student. To do so, go to "Fee Transactions" under the "Administration" heading in the student profile. Then, find the appropriate fee in the list of transactions. Once you have it, click "Payment" to the right of the fee. In the screen that opens, choose the date the payment was made, the description of the payment (if necessary), the amount of the payment, and the payment method. To aid in your book keeping, you can choose to add a payment reference number which matches whatever payment processor you are using.

Payments are generally assigned on a fee by fee basis, so you should repeat this operation for each fee that is being paid off, even if being paid in a single transaction. If you wish to make only a single payment and have it pay off all fees automatically, that can be done, but there is additional setup you may need to consider. If this is of interest, contact Desktop Support.