Setting up payment plans for your appointment-based services

Overview
Quick Reference: The Four Plan Templates
Single Visit
Multiple Visits
Membership with Recurring Visits & Payments
Membership with Recurring Visits & One-Time Payment
Choosing a billing model: flat rate vs. variable
First-month proration
When the first payment is due
Sibling discounts
Subscription holds, late fees, and auto-pay timing
Quick decision guide
FAQ
Related Articles

Overview

A payment plan on an appointment service controls how much the family is charged, when the charge happens, and what happens when the calendar isn't a perfect four-lesson month. The choices you make here flow through to checkout, recurring invoices, sibling discounts, member status, and several automations — so it's worth getting right the first time.

Note: "Appointment" is the service type used for one-at-a-time bookings like private lessons. Group classes and camps use session services, which have a different set of plan templates. This article covers appointment plans only.

Quick Reference: The Four Plan Templates

Plan Template	Best For	Bills	Self-bookable?
Single Visit	Trial lessons, one-off make-up sessions, audition prep	One charge at booking	✅
Multiple Visits	Pre-paid lesson packs	One charge at booking, lessons added as credits	❌ (admin only)
Membership with Recurring Visits & Payments	Ongoing weekly or biweekly lessons (the most common setup)	Monthly subscription	✅
Membership with Recurring Visits & One-Time Payment	Term-based or full-year prepaid lessons	One charge up front for the whole term	❌ (admin only)

Single Visit

What it does

Sells a single visit of a service, with a hard limit of one visit per period. This is also the plan template used for trial lessons.

Why you'd use it

Most studios offer one-off lessons on a case-by-case basis — a student has an audition coming up and wants an extra lesson with their teacher, a family is testing a new instrument before committing, or a former student wants to drop in over a school break. Single Visit lets you take payment cleanly without enrolling the family in anything ongoing.

Multiple Visits

What it does

Creates a pre-paid lesson pack. The family pays for a set number of lessons up front, and those lessons are added to the student's profile as service credits. They (or your front desk) book each lesson individually using those credits, the same way a make-up lesson is booked.

Why you'd use it

Packs are a great fit for families who want flexibility — vacationing parents, college students home for the summer, or adult learners who can't commit to a weekly slot. You get tuition up front; the family gets to schedule on their own rhythm.

Things to know

The price you set is the total price of the pack, not the per-visit price.
Buying a pack does not automatically enroll the student in a recurring weekly slot. Each lesson is scheduled individually.

Tip: If the family books all the lessons in their pack on the same weekday/time, you've essentially given them an ongoing subscription without the monthly billing — handy for short-term commitments like an 8-week summer program.

Membership with Recurring Visits & Payments

What it does

Enrolls the student in an ongoing subscription that bills monthly and reserves a recurring weekly or biweekly slot.

Why you'd use it

This is the workhorse plan for any music school running weekly private lessons.

Why: Predictable monthly revenue for you, an automatically renewing slot for the family, and one set of billing rules you configure once and forget.

Because this template has the most settings — and the most knock-on effects elsewhere in your account — the rest of this article walks through configuring it. The other three templates share many of the same fields (price, sales tax, sign-up fee), so most of what follows applies to them too.

Core fields

Field	What it controls	Why it matters
Name	The public-facing name of the subscription	Appears on the client profile, the subscription report, and the description column of the invoice report. Pick something families will recognize on a statement.
Description	Internal notes on the plan	Only visible inside the plan settings. Use for internal context.
Price	Full monthly tuition (flat rate) or per-lesson price (variable)	Drives every recurring invoice and your revenue reports.
Deposit	Amount collected at booking, separate from monthly tuition	Generally not used for appointment services. If you set one, it unlocks more flexible "first payment due" options — see below.
Sales tax	Whether sales tax is applied	Most U.S. states don't require sales tax on services. Check your state.
Sign-up fee	One-time registration, admin, or book fee charged at enrollment	You can choose to waive this for existing members — useful when an existing family adds a second student.

Note: If your studio uses the Tuition Policy feature, registration fees and household discounts may be pulled from the policy instead of the plan. When that's on, the plan-level fields are controlled centrally.

Visit frequency

Visit period - weekly or bi-weekly
Visits allowed per period - usually one for private lessons. May be locked depending on the plan template

Membership with Recurring Visits & One-Time Payment

What it does

Enrolls the student in ongoing weekly or biweekly lessons paid for in a single up-front payment, rather than monthly.

Why you'd use it

This is essentially a full-term plan. It's most common at studios in Australia and other regions where term-based billing is the norm, though some U.S. studios use it for a full school year or summer session paid up front.

Warning: These plans can't be self-booked. Because clients can't set an end date on their own subscriptions, an administrator has to handle enrollment.

Choosing a billing model: flat rate vs. variable

For monthly recurring memberships, this is the most consequential decision you'll make on the plan. It controls whether tuition is the same every month or moves with the calendar.

Flat rate

The student is billed the same amount every month, regardless of how many lessons fall in that month. Most studios use this, with the understanding that across the year, lessons average out to four per month.

Why you'd use it

Predictability — for you and for the family. Tuition is the same line item every month, families know exactly what to budget, and your revenue forecasting gets a lot simpler.

Things to know:

Cancellations don't change the monthly cost. (Exception: staff cancellations, if your settings issue monetary credits.)
Location closures don't change the monthly cost either. A flat rate is a flat rate.
A five-lesson month and a three-lesson month bill the same amount.

Warning: If your studio thinks of itself as "flat rate" but you've ever asked why a student wasn't charged for a fifth lesson in a particular month, you may actually want the variable model. Be clear with your team about which one you're using.

Variable

The student is charged each month for the number of lessons they're scheduled to receive. Three lessons in March means a charge of (price per lesson) × 3. Five lessons in May means a charge of (price per lesson) × 5.

Why you'd use it

Fairness families can see on their invoice.

Why: When tuition matches the number of lessons actually scheduled, you get fewer "why did I pay the same for a three-lesson month?" emails — and families don't feel like they're subsidizing closures.

Things to know:

Cancellations don't recalculate the invoice unless they're staff cancellations and your settings issue monetary credits.
Location closures do affect the monthly cost. A studio closed on December 25 means that lesson isn't billed.
The Count staff-canceled visits in per-visit billing toggle controls whether a staff cancellation still counts toward the billable visit count. Turn this on if your policy is "we credited the lesson, but tuition still counts it."

First-month proration

Proration controls how the first month of a subscription is billed when the student doesn't start on the 1st.

Warning: Proration only applies to the first month of a student's enrollment. It does not apply to the last month if a student ends their subscription, and it does not apply during subscription holds. For partial charges in those situations, use a one-time charge.

The proration models (flat rate only)

Model	How it works	Best for
No proration	The student pays the full flat rate no matter when they start, even on the last day of the month.	Studios with a simple "you start, you pay full tuition" policy.
Daily proration	First charge is reduced based on days left in the month after the start date. Like prorating rent.	Mid-month starters; uses your regular monthly price, no extra setup.
Daily proration, first-week exception	Same as daily, but students starting in the first week of the month pay the full rate.	Studios who want fairness for mid-month starters but find first-week proration unnecessary.
Visit-based proration	First charge = (per-visit price) × (number of lessons in the first partial month).	The most commonly recommended option. Makes the first month feel like a variable-rate month while keeping every month after that flat.
Visit-based proration, first-week exception	Same as visit-based, but first-week starters pay the full monthly rate.	Studios that want to avoid charging a first-week starter for five lessons when they would have paid for four in a normal month.

Why visit-based proration is the most popular

A family signing up mid-month thinks in lessons, not days. Why: "Two lessons left in November, so my first invoice should be for two lessons" is intuitive — and it removes the conversation about why a partial month costs $73.42 instead of a round number.

Tip: With visit-based proration, you'll set a separate price per visit (partial months) field. Some studios just divide the monthly rate by 4; others set a specific partial-month rate. This same per-visit price is also used during subscription holds.

When the first payment is due

How this setting behaves depends on whether the plan has a deposit configured. This catches a lot of new admins, so read carefully.

Without a deposit (the most common case)

The first payment is always due at sign-up — full stop. No other options are available. This is enforced for clients self-booking through your enrollment links, and the client can't change it.

Why: Without a deposit, "due at first visit" would mean the family books a recurring slot with nothing collected — high risk of no-shows and bad debt. Forcing payment at sign-up protects you on self-booked enrollments.

The admin-only exception

When you enroll a client from the admin side, you have one extra option: Enroll & pay later, which flips the first payment due date to the date of the first lesson.

Why: Sometimes you need to enroll a family before payment can clear — a parent waiting on a new card, a sibling joining mid-week, a family transferring from another studio. This option exists for those situations. It is not exposed to self-booking clients.

With a deposit configured

Once a deposit is on the plan, the other "due" options open up:

Due at sign-up — remaining balance is charged at enrollment alongside the deposit.
Due at first visit — deposit collected at sign-up; remaining balance charged when the first lesson happens.
Due x days before the first visit — useful for pay-before-you-play policies. You set the number of days.

Why: The deposit is what unlocks the flexibility, since something is being collected at booking even if the rest is deferred.

Sibling discounts

What they do

Automatically discount a subscription when another person in the same household already has a paid, active subscription.

Why you'd use them

Loyalty pricing for families enrolling more than one student. Why: Sibling discounts reduce the friction of adding a second or third child, and they signal to families that the studio values their whole household — not just one student.

Configuration

Setting	What it controls
Discount type	Flat dollar amount or percentage
How it's calculated	Applied to the plan total, or per lesson. For percentage discounts, plan total is typically required for consistency.
Include account managers	If on, account managers (payers) with qualifying subscriptions count toward sibling eligibility for dependents.

Important things to know

Only paid subscriptions make a sibling eligible. Free or $0 plans don't qualify another sibling for a discount on their own.
The discount applies from sibling 2 onward — not to the first enrolled sibling.
Sibling 1 just needs to be enrolled in something qualifying — not necessarily the same service.

Subscription holds, late fees, and auto-pay timing

Subscription holds

When enabled, administrators can pause a subscription. In Opus1, a hold means:

All of the student's lessons during the hold period are canceled.
No make-up credits are issued for those canceled lessons.
The student isn't charged during the hold.
The student's recurring slot is held for their return.

Why: Holds are how you keep a family enrolled through a temporary break — a summer trip, a sports season, an injury — without losing their slot or charging them for lessons they aren't taking.

Tip: Some studios prefer to charge a reduced rate during holds to retain the slot. That has to be done manually as a one-time charge, since the hold itself stops the billing.

Late payment fees

If enabled, you'll set the number of days after the due date that the fee kicks in, and the amount.

Warning: The due date of an ongoing monthly invoice is always the 1st of the month — regardless of any auto-pay offset you've set. Late fees are calculated against that 1st-of-the-month due date, unless it's a brand-new enrollment with a different first-payment due date.

Auto-pay timing

You can choose to run auto-pay a set number of days before or after the invoice due date.

Why: Running auto-pay a day or two before the 1st gives failed payments time to retry before the month is in arrears; running after gives families a grace period to update a card.

Warning: Changing this setting only shifts when auto-pay runs, not when the invoice is due. Invoices remain due on the 1st of the month.

Quick decision guide

If you want…	Use this combination
Predictable monthly tuition, everyone effectively starts on the 1st	Flat rate, no proration — or flat rate with first-week snap
Fair first-month billing for mid-month starters, no hand-math	Flat rate, visit-based proration (with first-week exception)
Tuition that matches the calendar every month	Variable rate; decide explicitly whether staff cancellations count
To sell a pack of lessons, not an ongoing subscription	Multiple Visits
A one-off lesson (trial, make-up, audition prep)	Single Visit
Full-term or full-year paid up front	Membership with Recurring Visits & One-Time Payment (admin-enrolled only)

FAQ

Q: A family is leaving mid-month. Will their last invoice be prorated?

A: No. Proration only applies to the first month of enrollment. If you want to refund or credit them for unused lessons, do it as a one-time adjustment.

Q: I put a student on hold halfway through the month. Will their invoice be prorated?

A: No. Holds don't trigger proration. If you want to credit the unused portion, issue a one-time credit or charge them the per-visit price for the lessons that already happened.

Q: Why isn't my flat rate student being charged differently for a five-lesson month?

A: Because flat rate means flat — the monthly amount is the same regardless of how many lessons fall in the month. If you want tuition to flex with the calendar, switch the plan to variable billing.

Q: Can a family choose to pay on the first lesson date instead of at sign-up?

A: Only if the plan has a deposit configured, in which case "Due at first visit" becomes an option. Without a deposit, self-booking clients are always charged at sign-up. Administrators can override this with Enroll & pay later when enrolling a family from the admin side.

Q: My second sibling didn't get the sibling discount. Why?

A: The most common reasons: (1) sibling 1 isn't on a paid active subscription, (2) the discount is on a different plan than the one sibling 2 enrolled in, or (3) the account manager isn't being counted (toggle "Include account managers" on if that fits your policy).

Q: Does "Count staff-canceled visits in per-visit billing" apply to all cancellations?

A: No. Only staff-initiated cancellations. Student cancellations follow your normal cancellation policy and don't count as billable visits.

Setting up payment plans for your appointment-based services

Table of Contents

Overview

Quick Reference: The Four Plan Templates

Single Visit

Multiple Visits

Membership with Recurring Visits & Payments

Membership with Recurring Visits & One-Time Payment

Choosing a billing model: flat rate vs. variable

Flat rate

Variable

First-month proration

The proration models (flat rate only)

Why visit-based proration is the most popular

When the first payment is due

Sibling discounts

Subscription holds, late fees, and auto-pay timing

Late payment fees

Auto-pay timing

Quick decision guide

FAQ

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