Private School Fees

An independent school, while a school, really needs to be treated like a business and in the current financial climite, one of the major problems facing any business is cash flow.

Cash flow, as you may know, is the movement into and out of the business's bank account and needs to be managed careful as even a profitable business can into trouble if it has money owing to it but has run out of money in it's bank account to pay it's suppliers or staff.

While many private schools tend to be invoiced by their suppliers (who know that the school invoices the parents at that time) termly to aid with this it can still cause a temporary "blip" in the cashflow if when the school invoices the parents they have no means to pay, as this means that some suppliers invoices may be paid late..

There are several options available to schools if they want to avoid this including invoice factoring and school fee credit schemes such as FlexiFee and FeeMaster. These latter two schemes allow parents to pay private school fees on a monthly direct debt basis, thus spreading the cost, while the school benefits from getting the fees at the beginning of each term in one lump sum.

The school can even add on extras such as music lessons and other extra-curricular activities which again, allows parents to spread the cost of these extras.

The market-leading provider of school fee finance in the UK is School Fee Plan (SFP) whose website contains details of how their schemes can help parents and schools.