Fixing a Duplicate Student Entry
This is specifically for the case where admission-number uniqueness didn't catch anything, because the two records don't share the same admission number — usually a rush at enrollment time where two staff each add the same new family without realizing the other already did.
What the uniqueness check actually catches
Admission numbers are checked for an exact match only, per school. If you try to add a student with an admission number that's already in use, Fees101 blocks it outright with "Admission number [X] is already used" and a link straight to the existing student — see Adding a Student.
Parent-phone matching is a separate system, and it doesn't block duplicate creation either — it only decides whether a new student gets automatically linked into an existing family (see Linking Siblings to a Family Account). If both staff also typed the parent's phone the same way, the two records end up as two "children" inside one family. If the phone was entered even slightly differently, they can end up as two unrelated families entirely, each with their own virtual account.
Fixing it once it's happened
Find both records — search by the parent's name or phone, since the admission numbers themselves won't look related.
02Decide which one to keep.
In practice this is almost always the one with real activity against it — an invoice already sent, or a payment already received.
03If the record you're discarding has no payment or invoice activity at all, use Changing a Student's Status to mark it Withdrawn.
This isn't a delete, but it removes it from active rosters and future billing without destroying the audit trail.
04If the record you're discarding already has money against it — for example, a parent paid into its virtual account before anyone noticed the duplicate — that's a money-movement problem, not a record problem.
Reallocate Family Credit only works between two students who already share the same family_id in Fees101, so it won't help across two genuinely separate duplicate families. In that case, a manual payment reversal (see Recording Manual Payments) or contacting Fees101 support directly is the realistic path, rather than trying to transplant the payment onto the other record yourself.
Preventing it next time
The practical safeguard is procedural, not technical: during a registration rush, have one person own data entry for a given family, or check the Students list for the parent's name before adding rather than relying on Fees101 to catch it after the fact.