Posted September 28, 2018
When school calculates balances by customer, the balance displayed on a POS screen for student, online statements and payments reflects all activity for the selected customer regardless of the associated student (if any).
Example: if there are several students in a family and the balance is tracked by customer, then whenever any of the siblings access POS, they will all share the same billing household customer balance. Similarly, if a school established Max Unpaid Balance in Student Purchase Option, then this option will take into account the customer balance. This option allows parents to load lunch money once for the whole family as opposed to loading it for each student individually. However, since the balance is tracked by customer, other households connected to the same students will not have access to either seeing the balance or loading the money onto the account.
Note: consider a situation when the balance is tracked by customer and a school creates an invoice for Smith Family for their daughter Amy’s fieldtrip. In this case, Smith family is marked as Amy’s billing household and Amy’s name is referenced on the invoice. Amy’s grandparents Jack and Karie Forest can still send a check to the school to cover her field trip and the system will allow the user to accept the receipt from a non-billing household. However, since the original invoice is not associated with Forest household and online statement and payments are configured to be shown by customer, Jack and Karie will not see Smith Family’s balance.