Academy › Track 5: Fees & Finance › 5.6 Bursar Principal ⏱ 5 min read v1.1

Financial overview and analytics

How to read the financial dashboard: total expected revenue, amount collected, outstanding balances, and payment trends by class, so you can make data-driven decisions about fee follow-up and financial health.

Before you begin

  • Fee templates have been applied to students for the current term (articles 5.1 and 5.2).
  • You are logged in as Bursar, Principal, or School Admin.

Opening the financial overview

  1. Go to Fees from the sidebar → Financial Overview tab.
  2. Enter the Academic Session (e.g. 2024-2025) and select a Term, then click Load.
  3. The dashboard shows collection totals for the selected period. Leave Term as All Terms to see the full year.

The four summary cards

  • Total Invoiced, the total of all fees raised for the selected period (includes all line items across all students)
  • Total Collected, the total amount received and reconciled against fees so far
  • Outstanding, Total Invoiced minus Total Collected (what is still owed)
  • Collection Rate, Total Collected as a percentage of Total Invoiced
Financial overview dashboard showing four summary cards (Expected, Collected, Outstanding, Collection Rate) and a class-by-class bar chart

Class-by-class comparison

Below the summary cards, the Classes by Outstanding Balance chart ranks each class section by how much is still owed. Use this to identify which classes need follow-up priority. For a per-student breakdown, go to Fees → Fee Assignments tab and filter by class and status.

Use the Outstanding view for follow-up. Filter to show only Unpaid students at the end of week 2 of term. Sort by outstanding balance (largest first) to prioritise the biggest outstanding amounts. Send fee reminders directly from this view.

Payment trends

The Trends tab shows a week-by-week view of payment inflows. This is useful for:

  • Identifying which week of term most parents pay (usually week 1–2)
  • Spotting a sudden drop-off in payments (which might indicate a problem with DVAs or the Paystack integration)
  • Comparing collection speed between terms to refine your follow-up strategy

Exporting financial reports

  1. After loading the Financial Overview, click Export in the top-right corner.
  2. Choose: Summary PDF (formatted financial report with school branding) or Full Data CSV (all transaction records for the period).
  3. The PDF report is suitable for presenting to school leadership or for record-keeping. The CSV is suitable for import into accounting software.
Financial data is real-time. The overview reflects payments as they are reconciled (DVA payments reconcile within minutes of the bank transfer). You do not need to refresh or wait for a daily batch update.

Common mistakes

  • Using Expected Revenue as the target without accounting for scholarship deductions or fee adjustments, check that the template was correctly applied before comparing collected vs expected.
  • Not using the fee reminder feature, many outstanding balances are from parents who simply forgot, not from parents who cannot pay. A polite reminder resolves a significant proportion of outstanding amounts.
  • Exporting the CSV and editing it rather than correcting the records in School Vault, changes to the CSV do not update the live records.

Related articles

Version history
v1.0 23 Jul 2026 Article published for Academy v1.0.
v1.1 10 Aug 2026 Fixed navigation: "Finance → Overview" → "Fees → Financial Overview tab" (fee collection analytics are in Fees, not Finance). Updated summary card labels to match live app (Total Invoiced / Total Collected, not Expected Revenue / Collected). Replaced non-existent student drill-down with correct path via Fees → Fee Assignments.
Last reviewed: 10 Aug 2026 · Version 1.1 · School Vault 1.0.0 · Stale after: 10 Nov 2026
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