Once fees are set up, collecting money in TeachHero is mostly automatic — enrollment checkout creates the bills, auto-pay charges the installments, and your job shrinks to watching a couple of screens. This guide walks the whole money path.
Step 1: Connect Stripe
Online payments run through Stripe. In the sidebar, click Settings, and on the School account tab scroll to Payment Processor, and click Connect to Stripe. You're done when its Status reads "Connected to Stripe." While you're there, check Default Payment Methods for Invoices — cards, ACH bank transfers, or both.
Deep dive: Setting up Online Payments
Step 2: Let checkout do the billing
When a family enrolls online, you don't create anything:
- Fees due immediately at checkout are charged then, with a receipt.
- Fees due on a specific date get their own bill due that day, which auto-pay collects on the date — see Managing Fees.
- Everything else lands on a bill automatically — on the family's chosen payment plan if they picked one.
Enrolling a student yourself works the same way: leave Bill the standard fees checked on the enrollment form and the term's fees go onto the student's bill at once, minus any automatic discounts, on the payment plan you pick there. To check the charges before the family sees them, open the bill, choose Manage → Hold, then Publish when it is ready. Held bills are listed under the Draft pill on Billing → Invoices.
You only create bills by hand for charges that don't come from enrollment (a lost book, a field trip). Do that from Billing → Invoices → New invoice. You land on the new bill, where its charges are added. Tick Hold as draft if you want to check it before the family sees it, and click Publish on the bill when it is ready.
Deep dive: Invoices
Step 3: Put collection on autopilot
On each bill:
- Turn on autopay — in the autopay alert at the top of the invoice. Pick the payer's saved card or bank account, and TeachHero charges it on the due date, or each installment on its date.
- Enable reminders — in Edit invoice on the invoice (or in bulk: select invoices on Billing → Invoices and choose Reminder settings). TeachHero emails the payer before you ever have to.
Then make the Scheduled tab (Billing → Payments → Scheduled) your weekly habit: it lists everything coming due in a date range and flags the two problems worth fixing early — No method on file and Update payment method. Turn on the Upcoming Autopay notification (Settings → Personal profile → Notifications) to get a digest of charges due in the next 48 hours.
Deep dive: Scheduled Payments
Step 4: Handle cash and checks
Families who pay offline still fit the system: Billing → Payments → Received → Record payment, choose the invoice and click Continue, then choose Check, Cash, or Other as the Payment Method. The payment goes onto that invoice, so what the family owes stays honest. The payer gets an emailed receipt.
Deep dive: Payments
Step 5: When money doesn't arrive
Work the checklist in Why didn't a parent get charged? — top to bottom. The most common causes, in order: the bill was never published, auto-pay got switched off (a failed charge does this automatically), or there's no usable payment method on file. The Failed pill on the Received tab shows each failure's reason — check it within a week, because failed payments are deleted after 7 days.
Step 6: Prove it's working
Open Reports monthly:
- Accounts Receivable — who owes you, aged by how overdue.
- Revenue — what you actually collected; group by Fee type to split tuition from registration.
- Refunds & Credits — what you've given back.
If your bookkeeper lives in QuickBooks, QuickBooks Sync pushes payments over automatically.