Why Loreto High School Beaufort Has Trusted FeeMaster for More than a Decade
For more than a decade, Loreto High School Beaufort has relied on FeeMaster to manage its fee billing. Bursar Francis Palmer has seen that relationship evolve first-hand and shared with us what's worked well and what's mattered most along the way. This case study looks at why FeeMaster has remained the right fit for a school where fee billing rests on the shoulders of one person, and what that says about the kind of support a smaller finance team needs.
Loreto High School Beaufort
Rathfarnham, Ireland
Voluntary Secondary School
FeeMaster
Francis Palmer, Bursar
- The school issues invoices for the entire school once a year, in June. Between that point and the start of term, changes are inevitable: charges get added and the odd family withdraws a place. With a single finance team member managing invoicing, each of these changes needs handling individually as it arises.
- FeeMaster gives Francis a working window between the June invoice run and September, when figures are finalised and posted to Sage. Added charges and withdrawn places can all be worked through during that period before anything is locked in, so the June-to-September correction window is manageable as routine tidying up rather than a string of one-off fixes made under pressure. "Fee billing is very easy to handle within FeeMaster, so it makes life an awful lot easier. We're not losing time by getting involved in credit notes."
Invoicing and Direct Debits
For Loreto High School, FeeMaster’s value comes down to two processes above all else: the annual invoice run and the direct debit collections that follow it.
Both are managed by a single person on the finance team, so there’s no room for either to go wrong once the cycle starts. As Francis puts it, “the top benefits are the running of the direct debit system and the issuing of invoices. Those are the two main things we focus on; they must be right. If that’s not right, we’re in trouble for the whole year.”
Setting up new direct debits has also become more reliable, since parents now submit their own details directly online rather than the school handling it manually at their end, removing a meaningful source of human error from the process. Between raising invoices in June and the start of term, changes are routine: a charge needs adjusting or a family withdraws a place. In FeeMaster, all of this is handled directly, without generating the credit notes and corrections that used to follow every change once it had already posted through to Sage under the school’s previous set-up. Because nothing reaches Sage until September, the finance team can make amendments as they arise rather than working around a paper trail.
Trusted Support
At Furlong, we understand that smaller finance teams need better support, not less of it. With just one person managing the entire invoicing cycle, Loreto doesn’t have the capacity to lose time chasing down issues or waiting on a resolution, every day matters when one person is carrying the whole process. Francis has had a consistently good experience with Furlong’s support team, and says he’d have no hesitation recommending FeeMaster to another school.
“"I would recommend FeeMaster. We get good support from Furlong; we're delighted with the help that we get."”
Francis Palmer, Bursar
See What FeeMaster Could Do for Your Fee Billing Cycle
If your school has a small finance team, FeeMaster is built to give you room to breathe between raising invoices and posting to your chosen accounting platform.