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Coach routes
Where you lay on transport to an activity, a coach route is the service you run and its stops are where pupils get on. A group member is put on a route and the stop they board at, and the fare appears on their invoice beside the membership it belongs to.
What the pupil pays depends on which stop they board at, so somebody joining at the far end of the route can be charged more than somebody near the end of it — whichever way round you choose to price it.
Setting one up
There are three pieces, and they have to be done in this order.
1. The charge
Settings > Finance > Charges — a charge whose type is Coach Charge.
A Coach Charge is per term and nothing else; there is no per-session or per-year coach fare. Its value is banded by stop number, and the bands are the same four you would use for anything banded:
| Who pays it | |
|---|---|
| Charge | Stops up to the first upper limit |
| Band 2 Charge | Stops up to the second upper limit |
| Band 3 Charge | Stops up to the third upper limit |
| Band 4 Charge | Every stop after that |
Each upper limit is the last stop in its band, not the first of the next one. So a first limit of 3 means stops 1, 2 and 3 pay the first charge and stop 4 starts the second band.
Stop banding where you only want one or two prices
An upper limit of 0 ends the banding there, and every later stop pays the band before it. Set the first limit to 0 and the whole route is one price.
2. The route and its stops
Settings > Finance > Coach Routes — the route, the Coach Charge it uses, and the Ledger Code its fares post to. The ledger code is required: fares are income and have to land somewhere, and they post to the route's code rather than the activity's.
Then the stops, in order along the route:
| No | The stop's number — this is what the charge's bands count |
| Stop | What it is called, which is what parents and the office see |
| Departs | When the coach leaves it on the way out |
| Returns | When it comes back to it |
Number the stops from 1, and no two stops on a route may share a number. The numbers are the pricing, so they need to run in the order the coach actually travels — renumbering a route changes what its passengers are charged.
3. The pupils
On a group member's Edit Details: Coach Route, then Coach Stop. The two fields appear once you have at least one route, and the stops offered are only the ones on the route chosen. Change the route and a stop that is not on the new one is cleared, so you are never left with a pupil boarding a stop that is not on their route.
What appears on the invoice
The fare is its own line, beside the membership line on the same invoice, and it posts to the route's ledger code. It is charged for the terms the membership covers, like any other per-term charge, and VAT is added as the charge's VAT code says.
No discount of any kind applies to a fare — no sibling discount, no multi-activity discount, no bursary, no remission, no discount code. The fare is the band's charge and nothing else.
When no fare is charged at all
A member gets no coach line, silently, if any of these is true:
- they have no route, or no stop
- the route has no Coach Charge on it
- the charge has no value for that academic year
The last one is the easy one to miss: a route set up for one year carries on existing into the next, and its passengers simply stop being charged until the charge is given a value for the new year. Check the charge has a value for the new year when you roll over.
If you used coach routes in Ensemble
They work the same way here — per term, banded by stop number — so what you set up before should be recognisable. The routes themselves are set up again in Xperios rather than carried over, so expect to enter your routes and stops and to put your members back on them.