Configuring Your Billing Settings
Your billing settings define the defaults that the platform uses when setting up billing for new students. This is a school level template — you can override everything on a per student basis later. The setup guide step
What Are Billing Settings?
Billing settings are your studio's defaults: the billing model you use most often, your standard lesson rates, your preferred invoice interval, and your payment instructions. When you create a new student enrolment, these defaults are used as a starting point — saving you time by not having to configure everything from scratch each time.
Key Settings to Configure
Default billing model
Choose the billing model you use for most of your students. Options include:
- Calendar-based — invoice based on lessons in the schedule
- Lesson packs — students prepay a bundle of lessons
- Monthly — fixed charge each month
- Term — one invoice per school term
You can always select a different model when creating a specific student's enrolment. See Which Billing Model Is Right for Your Studio? for a full comparison.
Monthly invoice detail
When your default billing model is Monthly, you can choose Show lesson dates on monthly invoices. This is the starting preference for new monthly enrolments. It lets their invoices show the scheduled lesson dates for that month, but does not change the monthly amount.
You can turn this preference on or off for any individual enrolment later.
Default lesson rate
Set a standard rate per lesson (or per period for monthly billing). This is drawn from your configured lesson types — the rate on the lesson type is the rate that will be used for billing.
If you teach both individual and group lessons, you will need lesson types set up as separate records for each. Individual and group lesson types are distinct in Octavia, and the app presents the relevant options in context — individual lesson types when you're working with individual enrolments, group lesson types when you're working with groups. Make sure you have lesson types configured for each teaching format you offer before you start creating enrolments. See Setting Up Lesson Pricing for how lesson types work.
Payment instructions
This is the text that appears on invoices telling families how to pay. For most studios, this is bank account details for direct transfer — for example:
Bank: First National Bank · BSB: 123-456 · Account: 12345678 · Reference: [student name]
If you connect Stripe for online payments, a Pay Now link is added to invoices automatically — you don't need to include card details in the payment instructions text. See Connecting Stripe for Online Payments. Stripe itself is connected from School Settings → Integrations → Stripe, not from this page.
Invoice collection mode
This sets whether invoices are generated manually (you create them when you're ready) or automatically on a schedule.
If you save a change to your default collection mode, billing interval, anchor day, or lead-time settings, Octavia asks whether you want to apply the new defaults to your existing enrolment contracts too, not just new ones going forward. If you choose to, you'll also confirm a date those contracts should be considered billable from.
For existing flat-fee contracts, the apply-from date must be after each enrolment's latest billed or waived period if the billing interval or anchor day is changing. For calendar contracts on automatic collection, it must be after the latest existing calendar invoice period. If any affected contract would overlap existing history, Octavia will stop the update so you can choose a later date or resolve the existing invoice first.
Lead Time (Send, Generate, and Heads-Up)
When your default collection mode is Automatic, three additional settings control the timing of automatically generated invoices, for whichever billing types support it (calendar, monthly, and term):
- Send lead time (default 14 days) — how many days before the billing period starts the invoice should be sent
- Generate lead time (default 3 days) — how many days before the send date the invoice should be generated, so you have time to review it
- Heads-up lead time (default 7 days) — how many days before the generate date you get an early reminder email
These become the starting point for new enrolments, and you can override them individually per student or group afterwards. See Automatic Invoicing, Lead Time, and Auto-Send: Full Guide for the full timeline and what the reminder emails look like.
Receipts
Octavia emails a receipt automatically as soon as an invoice is fully paid. If you would rather not email a receipt every time a payment is recorded, you can switch this off in the Receipts section of Invoice Settings. You can still send receipts manually, and families can still view them in the Family Hub. See Sending Invoices and Receipts.
Tax settings
Billing settings include an optional tax configuration. This controls whether Octavia calculates and displays tax on invoice lines.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable tax | Turns tax calculation on or off for invoices |
| Tax name | The label shown on invoices (e.g. GST, VAT, HST) |
| Tax rate | The percentage applied to invoice lines |
| Prices include tax | Whether your lesson rates already include tax (inclusive) or whether tax is added on top (exclusive) |
When tax is disabled, these fields are still saved but have no effect on invoice calculations.
Enabling tax also changes how the Money Reports section presents your income and expenses — it separates figures into inc-tax and ex-tax columns and shows tax collected and claimable tax paid. See Money Reports.
Financial year
The financial year used by Money Reports is derived from your school's country setting. Australian schools use 1 July, UK schools use 6 April, and US and Canadian schools use 1 January. This updates automatically if your country changes.
See Money Reports for more on how financial year reporting works.
Completing the Setup Step
The billing settings setup step completes automatically once the required fields are filled in. There's no separate "save" action for the setup guide — filling in the settings is sufficient.
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