Creating, Activating, and Closing Terms
A term is your billing cycle — where fee items, invoices, and payments actually live. Terms sit inside a session, and closing one is the single most consequential action in this part of Fees101, since it carries balances forward and locks the term's fee data.
Creating a term
Go to Fees → Cycles.
Choose Create term.
Enter a term name, start date, end date, and due date (when parents should pay by).
Choose the parent session — an existing one, or create a new session inline without leaving this form.
Optionally choose "roll forward fees from" a prior cycle, to start this term's fee structure as a copy of an earlier one instead of from scratch.
Optionally activate the term immediately.
Activating a new term
Activating a new term always closes-and-carries-forward whatever term was previously active — it goes through exactly the same path as Close Term, never a bare status flip. This means the fee roll-forward rules below apply automatically the moment you activate a new term, not just when you explicitly close the old one first.
Fee roll-forward follows billing frequency: per_term fees copy from the immediately-prior term; once_a_session fees only copy on an actual year boundary (sourced from anywhere in the departing session, deduped by name, class, and required status). See Choosing How Often a Fee Bills for the full rules.
Closing a term
Go to Fees → Close Term.
Review the preview of the ledger impact before committing.
Confirm the close.
- Outstanding balances carry forward to the new term automatically.
- Every invoice that had already been sent gets flagged needs_resend, since the numbers on it may no longer reflect reality once the term rolls over.
Reopening or deleting a term
Reopen a closed term as a draft to make its fee data editable again. A term still in draft status (never activated) can be deleted outright if you created it by mistake.