Best Practice: How to Add Revenue Streams

 

A Revenue Stream is the category a payment is filed under. You pick one on every invoice, recurring billing, one-time charge, and inventory category, and it’s the difference between knowing you collected $12,000 last month and knowing where it came from.

Revenue Streams were called Payment Reasons in Classic. Same idea, clearer name.

Choosing your streams

Aim for the categories you’d actually make decisions about. Too few and the reports say nothing; too many and nobody picks the right one consistently.

Most schools want:

• Membership — Tuition, the bulk of your revenue
• Registration — Sign-up and enrolment fees
• Testing Fees — Belt and promotion fees
• Merchandise — Uniforms, gear, apparel
• Events — Seminars, camps, parties

Add one for anything you’d want to evaluate on its own. If you’d ever ask “was summer camp worth running”, Summer Camp earns a stream.

Adding a Revenue Stream

1. Click Quick Links, then Settings, then Finances. Or click your username → Settings → the Finances tab.
2. In the Revenue Streams section, type the name in the text field.
3. Click the check mark or press Enter.

Names are capped at 125 characters — go over and it won’t save.

Managing Revenue Streams

• Edit — Orange pencil. Change the text, then check mark or Enter.
• Archive — Blue box. Removes it from dropdowns without touching historical records.
• Restore — Archived tab, green circular arrow.
• Delete — Archived tab, red trash can, then confirm. Permanent.

Using Revenue Streams

Every time you create an invoice, recurring billing, or one-time charge, choose the Revenue Stream from the dropdown. Set them on your inventory categories too — items inherit the stream from their category, so that’s a one-time job that pays off on every sale.

The title of a recurring billing is its Revenue Stream plus the person’s name, so “Membership for John Smith” is what you’ll see across the software. Another reason to name them plainly.

Where they show up

Four reports on the Reports tab in Finances are built on Revenue Streams:

• Payment Breakdown — Filter collections by stream over any date range
• Daily Collected Revenue — Daily totals per stream
• Monthly Collected Revenue — Month by month per stream
• Collected Tax — Combined with your tax settings

Each exports to .csv. See How to View and Export Finances Reports.

Troubleshooting

Revenue is in the wrong stream. The stream is stamped on the invoice when it’s created, so changing settings won’t reclassify history. On a recurring billing you can edit the stream, which also renames the billing and applies to future invoices.

A stream won’t delete. Archive it first; delete only appears on the Archived tab.

Everything is landing in Uncategorized. Somebody is leaving the dropdown alone. It’s worth five minutes with the front desk — this is the single most common reason finance reports turn out useless.

Limitations

One stream per invoice line item.

Admin-only. Employees select streams but can’t create them.

Renaming a stream doesn’t rename existing recurring billings.