Why Fees & Billing belongs in your SIS

For independent schools, finance is not merely a back-office function. It’s central to enrolment, parent experience, and cash flow.

In many schools, finance processes still rely on spreadsheets, legacy tools, and disconnected systems.

Most schools, according to Sentral Product Manager James MacDonald, “expect their systems to alleviate their workload, not add to it.” They seek a solution that’s simple, consistent, and dependable: “something that just works.”

The real question is not “one platform or many?” but rather which components of the enrolment to payment journey must reside in your SIS, and where should you intentionally integrate specialised finance tools like Xero or Microsoft Business Central?

The critical workflow you can’t afford to break

MacDonald identifies a workflow that cannot tolerate friction: enrolments → debtor creation → billing → invoicing → collecting payments → debtor management. This is the critical workflow. When this chain spans multiple products, reconciliation points can multiply and erode trust.

“If that flow of information is within one system,” he says, “it’s clean, consistent, and far less prone to errors. There are no handoffs between systems, no reconciliation points.”

So, MacDonald recommends that the first design decision should be to maintain the operational control of this workflow within your SIS, where live student and family data sits.

Why billing logic lives belongs in the SIS

Meanwhile, St Gregory’s College Director of Business Operations Brian Schick describes the billing succinctly.

“All the information we need for fees and billing is inside the student information system,” he says.

“Are the parents together or separated? Is grandma paying the school fees? What year is the child in? Do they have siblings? Are they on a scholarship? Do they have a bursary?”

That complexity does not exist natively in an accounting package; it lives in the SIS.

If you push billing into a separate finance tool, you must export and constantly re‑sync all these variables as students join, leave, or change status throughout the year.

“If you’re going to use a different product to create all the bills,” Schick argues, “you’ve got to transfer all that information into that other product and ensure it remains current.”

St Gregory’s College is an independent Catholic boys’ day and boarding school in Gregory Hills, southwest Sydney, with about 1,100 students across co‑educational primary and boys’ secondary on a single campus.

At St Gregory’s, the decision was made to use Sentral as the “point of truth” for enrolments and billing, connecting it to a modern accounting stack via APIs.

This represents the best‑of‑both‑worlds approach: the SIS owns the enrolment‑to‑payment workflow, while specialised finance tools manage the general ledger, reporting, and approvals.

Automation with governance still in finance’s hands

Keeping billing in the SIS does not mean sacrificing control. Sentral’s fee tables and flags allow St Gregory’s to automate sibling discounts, scholarships, and bursaries, resulting in a billing process that “goes pretty quickly.

However, Schick emphasises that this automation must be auditable.

“Our auditors want us to demonstrate how we verify that what Sentral has done is correct,” he says. His team runs a dummy billing for each fee, compares it to an Excel model of expected totals, takes screenshots for documentation, and retains that evidence before executing the live billing, which then takes only minutes.

This establishes a governance pattern: the SIS handles complex fee logic and mass billing, while finance retains responsibility for verification, documentation, and audit assurance.

Where you should hand off: best of breed accounting

None of this suggests that your SIS should replace a comprehensive accounting system. Both MacDonald and Schick strongly advocate against that.

“There are systems out there… that handle the grunt work associated with the general ledger and reporting,” MacDonald says.

“When you have your billing, enrolments, finance, debtor management, and parent payments in one system, and then hand off to an accounting package, the school benefits from the best of both worlds.”

Schick has experienced the alternative.

In a previous all in one platform, he “couldn’t even print out a balance sheet and a profit and loss,” because the product was “trying to be all things to all people.”

Today, at St Gregory’s, Sentral manages enrolments, fees, billing, and debtor control, while Xero anchors the accounting stack – covering 54 budgets, payroll, purchase approvals, and banking feeds.

“It all just works really well,” he says, “because it’s all industry-leading, and all the APIs just work.”

Cloud accounting and automation specialist Luis Sanchez calls this a “unified ecosystem of apps, of best of breed solutions” that enhance operational efficiency, drive financial clarity, and improve accountability. His perspective: accounting packages like Xero or Microsoft Business Central are ideally suited for general ledger management, reporting and increasingly AI driven insights, while systems like Sentral provide clean, trusted operational data.

Parent experience: the part that makes or breaks debtor control

The enrolment to payment workflow does not end when invoices are issued; how parents pay is equally critical.

After transitioning to an earlier version of Sentral Pay, St Gregory’s required parents to log in and set up a payment schedule for every invoice covering hundreds of sundry items. “It was a nightmare,” Schick recalls. “We lost control of our debtors.”

Collaborating with Sentral, they flipped that design.

Now, parents log into the same portal where they can view student information, select their payment method (card or bank account) and choose a payment schedule – weekly, fortnightly, monthly, termly or annually.

“That’s a set and forget,” Schick says. “When we run the bill… we instruct it to use those preferences, and it processes automatically.”

Parents can see all their invoices and bills, pay within the app, and modify their direct debit preferences all in one place. For the school, this has transformed hundreds of “$37.50” sundry invoices from manual tracking into predictable, automated collections. Schick expects “it’s going to take the whole pressure off us.”

MacDonald sums up the philosophy: “Parents are the clients of the school.” A unified, finance grade parent experience inside the SIS is not merely cosmetic; it directly supports cash flow and debtor control.

What this means for CFOs, business managers and IT

For leaders designing their next‑generation finance environment, the emerging model is:

Keep in the SIS:

Enrolments and family structure
Fee rules and billing logic
Debtor creation
Billing and invoicing
Parent payment plans and debtor management

Integrate to best‑of‑breed accounting for:

General ledger and chart of accounts
P&L and balance sheet reporting
Payroll and time‑sheet management
Purchase approvals and banking feeds

In other words, Sentral does not impose a “one size fits all” finance stack. It anchors the critical enrolment‑to‑payment workflow and unified parent experience, then connects cleanly to industry solutions such as Xero and Microsoft Business Central, so each school can create the right financial ecosystem for its context.

Schools do not have to choose between a single SIS and a modern accounting stack.

They can have both – a SIS that retains operational control where the data resides, and cloud accounting tools that excel in their specific functions, all interconnected in a way that, in Schick’s words, “just works”.

Brian Schick
Director of Business Operations

“It all just works really well because it’s all industry-leading, and all the APIs just work.”

In an education landscape where data can either overwhelm or empower, Brigidine College St Ives is well on the way to turning information overload into actionable insights. By unifying its systems, the school is making a measurable difference in student wellbeing, academic outcomes, and staff decision-making.

Background

Brigidine is a non-selective Catholic independent school in Sydney’s north, educating about 800 girls from Years 7 to 12.

Since opening its doors in 1954, the school has consistently ranked among the top 100 schools in NSW and is known for its strong academic results, commitment to social justice, and focus on nurturing the whole student.

Challenges

By 2017, the school’s digital landscape was fragmented. Critical information about students was scattered across platforms, making it hard for staff to respond quickly or see the full picture.

Deputy Principal Teaching and Learning, Leone Smyth, says: “Too much information was being recorded in different places or shared informally, which made it hard to track students’ progress or provide timely support."

This challenge mirrors what many schools experience: siloed data that hinders both academic and wellbeing initiatives.

“We needed a single source of truth,” she says. “Bringing everything into one system was about improving clarity, support and consistency for staff, students, and families alike.”

The finance team faced similar obstacles.

Finance Officer Nicole McLeod recalls: “The old setup couldn’t support both the teaching and finance sides; it just wasn’t keeping up. We were after one system for the whole school,” she says.

As well, manual processes slowed down payment schedules, limited options for parents, and made it difficult to track changes or add notes to student accounts.

Solution

Seeking a single source of truth, Brigidine transitioned to Sentral in 2017.

The model stood out by offering functional areas and modules in:

Education management: Attendance; wellbeing; assessment and reporting; curriculum and learning plans
School administration: Enrolments and admissions; health; staff absences; visitor management; asset manager; purchase orders
Communication and engagement: Parent portal & app; student portal; messaging; meetings and interviews
Finance and business management: Sentral Pay; StudentPayPlus; Fees and billing; accounts payable.

Schools can adopt as many or as few of Sentral’s modules as they wish, opting to customise for a more tailored configuration.

Brigidine began a staged rollout, focusing on core Sentral modules of attendance, roll marking, and reporting.

Refinement: From data to action

Even with Sentral in place, staff wanted more: not just data collection, but actionable insights.

“The problem wasn’t a lack of data – it was that information lived in different places and wasn’t always easy to interpret or act on,” Leone says.

Teachers less confident with digital tools often relied on colleagues to extract or visualise reports, delaying access to valuable insights.

Leone says: “We’d have some notes in a chronicle, others in wellbeing records, and different flags in class lists or attendance logs. It was hard to see the whole student at once, and that made things like differentiation, parent meetings, or proactive intervention more difficult than they needed to be.”

To bridge the gap, Brigidine partnered with Sentral’s data analytics consultant John Russell to co-design a custom dashboard using Microsoft Power BI. It’s a proprietary tool for creating interactive data visualisations. The aim: to create a streamlined, visual interface where teachers and leaders could see each student’s attendance, wellbeing, academic trends, and discipline records at a glance.

“Sentral doesn’t pretend to have every bespoke need off the shelf – and that’s a good thing,” Leone adds. “What they offer is flexibility. They’ve supported us to build the kind of tools we need, when we need them.”

John adds: “What matters is that we work with schools to solve their real problems – together. We’ve been working closely with Leone and her team to understand how they’ve historically reported and what they need now, so we can help them unlock insights directly from within Sentral.”

Early results and ongoing development

The dashboard, currently in limited release for school leadership, is already changing the way staff engage with student data.

“You can look at a single student and get a snapshot – grades over time, attendance patterns, flagged wellbeing concerns – all in one place,” Leone says. “That changes the quality of conversations we can have, whether it’s in a classroom planning meeting or a pastoral care check-in.

“We’re more likely to ‘know our students’ and not let them slip under the radar without getting the necessary supports.”

As the dashboard expands to more staff later in 2025, Brigidine expects it will build data confidence across the board, making it easier for everyone to support students proactively.

Sentral’s support has extended beyond software delivery. From early migration and data cleaning to co-designing tailored solutions, the Sentral team has worked closely with Brigidine to ensure the system evolves with the school’s needs.

“We’ve been able to customise how we use it, whether that’s building our own training videos, integrating wellbeing workflows, or now co-developing a dashboard,” Leone says.

Nicole notes the improvements in finance: “Invoicing is quicker, more flexible, and parents can now set their own direct debit schedules. That saves time on our end and improves the experience for families.”

She’s keen for further enhancements, especially around managing complex fee arrangements, but is confident Sentral is listening and responsive.

Looking ahead

Brigidine’s journey demonstrates that with the right partnership and a willingness to innovate, schools can turn data challenges into opportunities for better outcomes.

As the dashboard becomes available to all staff, the focus remains on empowerment – ensuring every team member, from classroom to business office, has the insights and tools to support student success.

“We weren’t just looking for a dashboard,” says Leone. “We wanted something that spoke directly to how our school works – something that would evolve with us, not sit static. Sentral has supported us to grow the system as our needs evolved.”

The school’s use of Sentral is evolving into a fully embedded solution, supporting academic records, wellbeing, co-curricular tracking, student awards, finance, and parent communications – with future plans to leverage AI to further enhance engagement with families.

For John, this project also reveals a broader truth: schools need tools that simplify, not complicate, their data experience, making it easier for educators to focus on what matters most – supporting students.

Leone Smyth
Deputy Principal Teaching and Learning

"We weren’t just looking for a dashboard. We wanted something that spoke directly to how our school works – something that would evolve with us, not sit static."

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It’s built to work with everything.

Independent schools are always evolving, expected to deliver exceptional student and parent experiences even when resources are stretched. With over 25 years of working with schools and educators, Sentral is an open, cloud-based platform that unifies your existing systems, giving you the clarity to make better decisions and the agility to evolve as you grow.

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