By Janet Menosky Smith

​Are you looking for a simpler billing practice and a more consistent income from month to month? If so, a monthly tuition structure may be a good choice for your tutoring practice. Read more on how it can be done and see if it's right for you.

When I started tutoring, I used an hourly-based structure for charging clients.
The basic structure for most clients was 2, 1-hour sessions per week at XX dollars per session. I would send an invoice to be paid in advance of each month. (Paying 1 month in advance is another practice I highly recommend.)
I kept one day open for make-ups and gave families 2 options for make-up times when they missed, or I would still earn the fee.

In many ways, this worked well, but the two biggest downsides to the hourly structure were:
1.     There were more sessions called off and rescheduled. When people can reschedule, they do and even though I had it structured into my practice, it became increasingly difficult as I added more students.
2.     The income could vary widely each month, some months (like when there was a Christmas break or my vacation) it would be lower than usual and when a given month had five weeks, my families would feel the pinch of a significantly higher bill.

I wanted a more consistent income and simpler billing solution. This led me to get advice from fellow tutor Dite Bray of Ladder Learning Services, who shared with me the basic chart of how they structured a monthly tuition for her tutoring business. 
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I've created an example of the chart but with numbers I put into it for the purpose of illustration:
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To create a chart like the one here, you would first put in your basic hourly rate for the number of sessions per week you typically do. For the sake of illustration, I put in $50 per hour for 2 hours a week.

You then determine how many weeks per year that you want to charge for tutoring. This example has 45 weeks per year. What this does is build 7 weeks off each year directly into the tuition rate.

So, in this case, let’s say the tutor has allowed 2 weeks for holidays and Christmas break, 2.5 weeks for tutor days off and vacation, plus 2.5 weeks off for student days off and vacation.

Note that if a student tutors twice a week, then 2.5 weeks off equals the three tutoring sessions off that they would have during that time. 
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You also have to decide how much of a discount you want to give to families when they add more sessions per week, then put those amounts in the hourly rate column.

In this chart, the price for reducing to 1 hour a week actually increases the amount per hour, since there are less sessions per week.

To determine the monthly and yearly rate use the following formula for each row. For example:
$50 (hourly rate) x 2 (#sessions per week) = $100 (charge per week)
$100 (per week) x 45 (weeks per year) = $4500 (yearly price)
$4500 (yearly price) ÷ 12 (months) = $375 monthly tuition

With this structure, when a family calls off, they simply are using one of their built-in days. When they take a week off for vacation or summer camp, they are doing the same. If they go over that, they understand that they will lose paid-for sessions.

As a tutor, you also have built in days or weeks you can take, without it affecting your income. There is no rescheduling unless both parties want to do so, to preserve a day off for another time.

This monthly tuition structure has worked beautifully for me in simplifying billing and making my income more stable. When a family has to take a day off, they just do so, without the need to reschedule, which is also nice.

I have found that families also like the predictability of knowing what their charge will be each month, and also knowing that they already have built-in days off that they can use, and that holidays are also accounted for within it.

A bonus I didn’t expect is that families rarely cancel or reschedule. They guard their days off like gold and use them for the most important things, like a family vacation or an unavoidable absence.

In the next posting on this subject, I’ll cover some common questions including: How do you handle all the Monday holidays, that impact students who are scheduled for that day? What about summers? How do you handle emergencies like sessions being cancelled because there is no Internet service?

Yours in Reaching & Teaching,
Janet

By Janet Menosky Smith

​Tutors often struggle with issues surrounding payment policies and dealing with late or sometimes non-payment for services. Setting expectations using a written tutoring agreement with clear policies can help you avoid many pitfalls.
Payment Policies - A Key Part of Your Tutoring Agreement

Tutors often struggle with issues surrounding payment policies and dealing with late or sometimes non-payment for services. Setting expectations using a written tutoring agreement with clear policies can help you avoid many pitfalls.
As a tutor, you may have your own expectations, but unless they are clearly spelled out, even your best clients will have their own set and misunderstandings, or occasionally feeling taken advantage of, are more likely to happen. Clearly spelling out the policies of your practice will help to avoid these scenarios.

Agreement – not Contract
I like to use the word “agreement” as opposed to “contract,” because I am not a big tutoring company that signs clients up for a large up-front amount and commits them to 4 to 6 months at a time. I charge month-to-month, and my clients can cancel at any time, however, I do have policies in place to protect my income from unexpected changes. Here are some of them:

Payment Policies
The agreement begins by noting the days and times agreed to by both parties for when tutoring will take place. The agreed price is also listed. In my case, I charge monthly tuition, but it used to be a per lesson price.
The biggest protection and stress-avoider I have regarding payment is my requirement that clients pay at the beginning of the month for each month’s tutoring sessions. My wording is as follows:

Tuition for the entire month will be paid on the first day of the month. Invoices are sent via email. You may pay online via direct link, arrange online payment via your bank, or mail a check to the address above.
Tutoring is suspended if not paid by the first session of the month, before the first scheduled tutoring session, until payment is made.
Invoices are sent by email 1 week before the first of each month.
A $10 late fee will be added to next month’s bill if payment is not received on the first.

I don’t believe I’ve ever actually charged the fee, but it’s in the agreement to make the point that on-time payment is expected.

This policy works whether you charge by the session or do a monthly tuition charge. I added the sentence on requiring payment before even one session is taught to my original policy because I would have occasional late payers that would always need reminded a day or two after the month began. Now, I can just send a reminder the day before with the wording, “Hi ____, I notice I haven’t received payment yet, and the new month is starting tomorrow. I want to make sure it’s taken care of so that _____ doesn’t miss any sessions. Thanks!”

More recently, I’ve avoided invoicing by email and needing to send a reminder email because I began billing clients using a Venmo business account. I can press a button to “send reminder,” and I usually get an immediate response.
Using a payment app like Venmo or similar services also works well because clients receive a text and they can reply and pay right from their phone, which is often the way many of us do business these days.

While I haven’t done this, another option is having client payments automatically deducted each month. PayPal offers an option to set this up. Then, clients are automatically charged each month without the need to send a payment request.

A final protection some tutors include is requiring a deposit equal to one- or two-weeks tutoring charge. This provides a cushion of protection from last-minute decisions to end services.
For my practice, I request two weeks’ notice before the next payment is due and use the time to do a progress evaluation and provide a final written summary. Here is my wording:

If you plan to discontinue services, please provide two weeks’ notice before next month’s payment is due, so I can do a final wrap-up, progress evaluation, and provide you with a final written progress report. If less than 2 weeks’ notice is given, you have the option to pay for an additional two weeks of services for the final wrap-up, progress evaluation and written report.

My clients want this final summary and progress report, so they plan around giving me the two weeks’ notice, though in most cases, the end of tutoring is discussed well in advance of two weeks.

These clear payment expectations and policies have eliminated issues surrounding lateness or non-payment for services already received. They can be personalized to fit your specific practice needs, but ultimately, communicating your own policies in writing will establish a professional and positive understanding with your clients.​
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Yours in reaching & teaching,
Janet

By Janet Menosky Smith

​Family vacations, summer camps, Monday holidays and Internet disruptions can all wreak havoc on our tutoring schedule. Today we offer just a few ideas on ways to handle each of these things.

In the previous blog post, I shared the structure I use for creating a monthly tuition-based tutoring model for year-round tutoring. Since I offer reading intervention tutoring for students with dyslexia, it makes sense to encourage families to keep tutoring regularly during the summer.

But sometimes families have vacation plans, summer camps and other activities packed into their schedules, and you may also have some extra times you want to take off.

One solution to maintain consistency, but add flexibility, is to offer a set number of sessions in a summer tutoring package.
For example: most summer vacations from school last about 2 ½ months or 10 weeks. If you allow for 1 week for a student vacation and 1 week for your vacation/time off, that would leave 8 weeks of instructional time. Multiply that by 2 times per week for a package of 16 sessions for XX total price.

You could add further consistency and flexibility by letting families know that if they are gone for a few weeks, they can do extra sessions in the weeks they are home. Many tutors use a scheduler such as the one in Tutor Bird or Zoom to allow their families to find open time slots and select their schedule. Let them know that they lose any sessions they don’t use.

If you like a more flexible summer schedule such as this, you can modify your tuition or per-hour structure to a school-year length, rather than a full year structure.
With the built-in time off in my yearly tuition set-up, it has worked for me to keep a year-round structure, but the summer package might be a good option for tutors who want more scheduling leeway.

Here are answers to a few more questions:

How do you handle all the Monday holidays that students scheduled for that day will miss, while other students never get the same holiday off?
When I have a Monday holiday scheduled as off, I will then also schedule a Tuesday after the holiday off for non-Monday students. I do make these days optional, so if a family still wants to meet, I will be there.
Also, I do use discretion in allowing some Monday holidays (such as Presidents Day) to be optional. I still work and families can choose whether or not to take one of their days off.

How do you handle last minute emergencies, such as the Internet not working?
If the Internet is down in my or my family’s area, then I will try to reschedule, so neither of us lose one of our days off. If the Internet issue is something the family needs to address, I usually allow one reschedule, but after that, each disruption will count as one of their days off.* For illness, I use my day off or have the family use one of their days. For most circumstances, a built-in day off is used but I always allow for consideration of the situation before offering a reschedule.
I hope this gives you some ideas on how to make your own summer tutoring plans!
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Yours in Reaching & Teaching,
Janet