The tuition leak calculator.

The leak is rarely families refusing to pay. It’s mechanical:

• Cards expire and get replaced. A card on file from two years ago fails silently, and the family doesn’t know until someone mentions it at the front desk — if anyone does.
• Declines nobody retries. Many failed charges would succeed on a second or third attempt a few days later. If nobody — or no system — retries, the money just stops.
• Invoices that age out. A balance from last term sits in a report nobody opens. The older a failed payment gets, the less of it ever comes back.
• Staff time. Chasing payments by phone and email is the first thing dropped in a busy week — which is exactly when the list grows.

What a dunning ladder does about it

A dunning ladder is the sequence that runs automatically when a payment fails: retry the card on a schedule, prompt the family to update their card through the parent portal, send escalating reminders, and flag the account before the next charge piles onto a bad card. In Coycoe for Classes it’s built into tuition billing, because tuition is fused to enrollment — the system already knows who owes what, and for which student.

Run the calculator with your real failed-payment rate if you know it. If you don’t know it, that’s the first finding: most studios that go look find a number between 5% and 12%.