From attendance to monthly fees at a padel school

At a padel school, month-end is usually the worst part: a spreadsheet, absences jotted in the coach’s notebook and students asking why they’re paying more this month. The problem is rarely collecting the money. It’s knowing what to collect.

The cleanest way to solve it is to stop thinking of the fee as a fixed figure. If the fee is the sum of the chargeable classes, and every class is recorded, the sums do themselves and can be explained line by line.

Where we mention screens in PadelVER, we give their names in Spanish, as they appear in the app.

First, the rules

Before you take the first register, decide three things and tell your students:

The price per class. There’s a standard one for the course and, if needed, a separate one for a particular student.
Absences without notice. Do you charge for them or not? It’s a setting on each course, and by default you do.
How late someone can give notice. Students can give notice on the site up to however many hours before the class you choose, 2 by default. After that, they have to call the club.

Taking the register, by phone

It’s the only thing the coach has to do, so it has to be quick. In PadelVER, the “Hoy” card on the roster is designed for phones: one button per student that switches between “Asistió” and “Faltó”, plus “Todos asistieron” and “Guardar lista”.

If you give the coach the Coach role, they’ll only see their own courses and students. They can take the register and record absences, but they can’t change prices or collect fees.

A class left without a register is charged as attended, and flagged in orange for someone to check. That way a slip doesn’t give anyone a free class or leave a fee half done.

The exceptions that always happen

A clear fee depends on how you handle the cases that fall outside the norm:

Notified absence. The student says they can’t make a class, giving a reason, and that class isn’t charged. There’s no need to record health details: the reason is enough.
Absence without notice. Charged or not, depending on what you decided for the course.
Make-up. The student makes up a notified absence in another class on the course. The missed class isn’t charged and this one is, at the same price by default, although you can set another or make it free. Each absence can be made up once.
Substitute. Someone takes a place in a single class and pays for that class.
Class cancelled by the club. It isn’t charged and the court is freed up. PadelVER doesn’t send emails in this case, so tell your students yourself.

The fee, without spreadsheets

Each student has one fee a month on each course, with the classes chargeable that month and their amount. While it’s pending, it follows attendance: if you take the register or record an absence, it changes by itself.

A paid fee doesn’t change. If something would alter what that student is charged that month, the panel won’t do it and says what the new amount would be. You have to reopen the fee, make the change and collect it again. It’s an extra step, but it stops the amount on a paid receipt changing without anyone knowing.

Tell them before you charge

The fee notice works best when it arrives in time to pay. By default, each student gets it on the day of their last class of the month, at 10:00, with the expected amount, so they can pay at that very class. If the class starts before 12:00, it arrives at 20:00 the evening before.

You can also send it on the last day of the month, on the 1st once the month has closed, or only by hand from the roster. It goes by email and, if the student has a player account, to their notices. A student with neither email nor account can’t be notified, so it’s worth asking for one of the two when you enrol them. If the student is a minor, the notice goes to the person responsible for them.

And collecting

The fee is paid at the club, in cash or by card terminal: PadelVER doesn’t collect online. Marking it as paid adds it to the day’s takings alongside bookings and tournament entries, and if you collect a different amount, such as a discount or rounding, the difference is kept as an adjustment with its reason.

With all this in place, when a student asks why they’re paying what they’re paying this month, the answer is on a screen: which classes, which are chargeable and at what price.