Accounts Receivable Management

“Collecting payments from parents is vital to maintaining the financial health of an education business and in effectively managing cash resources,” writes Kathy Ligon in the book, Art of Leadership: Managing Money in Early Childhood Organizations. “Careful considerations in creating healthy policies is critical when developing the business initially, and most important in the daily management of practices and processes that minimize collection issues…

Schools that require bank draft for payments love the ease and reliability of this option. It has been our experience that direct withdrawal (sometimes called ACH) is most successfully implemented when a center opens because parents are often reluctant to change to this option later. The center simply pulls payments from the family’s checking account…and only has to follow up on accounts that did not have sufficient funds for payment. [Schools that have been in operation a while] might try to slowly migrate check-writing customers to the ACH method and emphasize that parents will not have to manually write so many checks.”

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