Recovered 22% of unbilled tuition and rebuilt the school's finance operating model
Premium Secondary School Group
- Duration
- 1 term to stabilise, 2 terms to full run-rate
- Team
- Partner, 2 accountants, 1 integration engineer
- Scope
- 3 campuses, 2,400 learners, 6 fee categories
- Region
- Nigeria
Client challenge
A three-campus secondary school could not reconcile fee collections with enrolment. Bursary was manually invoicing 2,400 learners each term with recurring parent disputes and rising receivables.
The starting position
Enrolment lived in the student information system, billing lived in spreadsheets and collections lived in three bank accounts. Nobody could state, on any given day, how much tuition had been earned versus billed versus collected. Parents disputed invoices routinely because discounts and scholarships were applied inconsistently by campus.
What we actually changed
We reconciled enrolment to billing learner-by-learner and found 22% of tuition had never been invoiced. A formal fee structure, discount matrix and scholarship register were signed off by the board, then encoded into an automated term-opening billing run driven directly from the SIS. Accrual accounting replaced cash recording so that deferred income and receivables finally appeared on the balance sheet.
Why it stuck
A receivables desk with published escalation SLAs and a weekly review chaired by the principal made collections everybody's business. Parents receive a clean statement they can reconcile themselves, which removed most disputes at source.
Our solution
Implemented a school-native billing engine integrated with the SIS, migrated to accrual accounting and stood up a receivables desk with escalation SLAs and parent-facing statements.
Business outcome
First full term after go-live, the school billed every enrolled learner, cut disputes by 71% and collected 96% of tuition by week four.
- 1
Diagnostic of enrolment vs billed vs collected across three campuses and six fee categories.
- 2
Rebuilt fee structure, discount matrix and scholarship register with the head of school.
- 3
Integrated SIS with QuickBooks via middleware; automated term-opening invoices.
- 4
Trained bursary team and stood up weekly receivables review with the principal.
enrolment to billing, line by line
of a full-term fee roll
term-opening run from SIS
up from 74% at term end
manual invoicing eliminated
central register with board approval
| Metric | Before Soteria | After Soteria |
|---|---|---|
| Fee collection rate | 74% | 96% |
| DSO | 58 days | 19 days |
| Billing accuracy | 82% | 100% |
| Parent disputes / term | 118 | 34 |
"Soteria didn't just fix our books — they rebuilt how the bursary works. Our board finally trusts the numbers."
We can run this playbook for your schools organisation.
In a 45-minute confidential briefing, the partner who led this engagement will benchmark your current numbers, identify the three fastest sources of value and give you a written scope with fixed fees — at no cost.
- Partner-led, not junior-staffed
- Fixed-fee scope before we start
- First results inside 90 days
- NDA signed before any data moves
From spreadsheet chaos to consolidated stewardship reporting in 90 days
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