Every birr accounted for

Ethiopian schools bill by Ethiopian months, with tuition due in Meskerem, Tikimt and Hidar, and software that only understands Gregorian months fights the office all year. Temari's fee engine is native to the Ethiopian calendar: fee structures state their amounts and their schedule in the months the school actually uses, and invoices generate themselves per student on that rhythm, every month, without anyone remembering to run them.

Fees are set up as structures: tuition, registration, transport, meals and uniforms, each with its own amount per grade, its own schedule, and its own collection accounts. Registration fees can gate enrollment, so the class lists and the cash position never quietly disagree. When a fee changes, it changes for future invoices; issued invoices and paid history stay exactly as they were.

Late payment is handled by policy too: reminder SMS messages that state the exact amount and deadline, on a ladder the school configures, and optional penalties computed by rule rather than by whoever happens to be at the desk that day.

The heart of the module is the verification loop. A family pays the school directly, by Telebirr or CBE Birr into the school's merchant account, by transfer into its bank account, or in cash at the office, and submits the transaction reference from the family portal. The finance officer sees a queue of submitted references, checks each against the school's own account, and confirms with one action. The moment a payment is verified, the receipt exists and the family has it.

Every receipt carries a QR code that resolves to a public verification page: an auditor, a bureau official or a suspicious relative can scan it and confirm the school issued that receipt, without seeing any other family's data. Forged receipts are the quiet plague of a manual cash office, and this is where they stop working.

Each recorded payment names the collection account it landed in, per branch. Reconciliation stops being a monthly archaeology project because the ledger was built account by account from the start. History is frozen too: a re-pointed fee or a renamed account never rewrites last term's receipts.

Every discount is a named policy with an approver behind it. A concession (a scholarship, a sibling discount, a staff-child rate) is recorded once against the student or the family, scoped to specific fees and a period, and applied automatically every time invoices generate. School-wide rules (sibling percentages, employee-child rates) file suggestions that finance approves case by case, so no reduction happens quietly and every birr of it has an approver's name on it.

The expense side carries the controls Ethiopian audits expect. Expenses above the school's threshold require a second approver, and nobody approves their own request, which the system enforces rather than a memo on the wall. The director's access to money functions is a school-level switch, because in most Ethiopian schools the director is the academic head and the money belongs with the finance officer and the principal.

On top of the verified income and controlled expenses sit the reports a school actually runs on: daily collections, debtor lists by class (the homeroom teacher's follow-up sheet), budget versus actual with a gapless year window, and statements ready for the auditor. All of them read from the same records, so the numbers cannot disagree with each other.