Treat each enrollment as a deal. Give the pipeline stages that follow the student from inquiry to the last payment, and store the campus, program, start date and plan terms as deal properties. Associate both the student and whoever pays. Then every report you need, by campus, cohort or program, comes from the deals you already have.
Why run tuition plans from the CRM at all?
Admissions already lives there. The rep who enrolled the student knows the program, the start date, the funding and the agreement. When the plan is set up somewhere else, that knowledge gets retyped, and the two versions drift the first time something changes.
When the enrollment deal carries the plan, admissions, finance and the campus director are looking at the same record.
What stages should the pipeline have?
Keep them tied to things that actually happen:
- Inquiry
- Applied
- Accepted
- Enrollment agreement sent
- Enrolled, deposit paid
- Started
- On plan
- Paid in full, or withdrawn
Stages 5 to 8 are where most schools lose track. If "started" and "on plan" aren't stages, nobody can see which students have a balance still running.
Which deal properties matter?
- Campus, so reporting and payouts can be split by location. Keep one value per campus, and make it match the campus's bank account and the location tag in your books, so the three never drift. See one LLC per location, or one for all? and QuickBooks classes or Xero tracking categories.
- Program and cohort start date, so charges can be tied to the start.
- Tuition, deposit and balance remaining.
- Plan terms: number of payments, frequency and first payment date.
- Funding sources: self-pay, federal aid, workforce funding, employer or VA benefits. Many CDL students have part of the cost covered, and the plan should only cover what's left.
- Payer, when it's a parent, spouse or employer rather than the student.
Associate the student and the payer as separate contacts. The student gets program emails. The payer gets the invoices.
What's different for CDL and other short programs?
CDL and many trade programs run for weeks, not years. A plan can last longer than the program itself, so the student may finish training with payments still to make. Say so plainly in the agreement, and keep the deal open in "on plan" until the balance is paid, not until graduation.
What should you report on each month?
- Students on a plan, by campus and cohort.
- Balance remaining, by campus.
- Payments that didn't go through this month, and who is following up.
- Withdrawals, and what happened to each plan.
HubSpot's own documentation covers how to add pipelines, properties and reports, and it changes often enough that it's worth reading there rather than here.
Paycove builds the plan from the enrollment deal in HubSpot, charges it from the class start date and writes the balance back to the deal, with each campus paid into its own account and books.
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