Weekly, biweekly or monthly? Choosing your academy's billing cadence

Deciding how often to bill families is one of the first administrative choices a football academy makes, and one of the most underestimated. Your billing cadence determines how many times a month you talk about money with each family, how large each charge is, and how much follow-up work your collections create.

In Cantera Soccer, the cadence is not set at the academy level or per player: you assign it to each parent. With that in place, the system generates charges automatically every night at 11:59 p.m. (Mexico City time), with no manual entry and no duplicate charges within the same period.

The three cadences, with their exact windows

Before weighing pros and cons, it helps to know exactly when each charge type is generated and when it falls due.

Weekly billing

• Generated: on Sunday or Monday each week.
• Due: on Friday of that same week.

Families start the week with the charge visible in their portal and have the working days to settle it before the weekend.

Biweekly billing (twice a month)

• Generated: between the 12th and the 15th, and between the 27th and the 30th of each month.
• Due: on the 15th and the 30th.

Due dates are fixed for every family on this cadence, which keeps the message simple: payments here land on the 15th and the 30th.

Monthly billing

• Generated: starting 3 days before the billing day you set for that family.
• Due: on the billing day itself, which can be any day from the 1st to the 31st.

Those 3 days of lead time act as a notice window: parents see the charge before it is due, not on the day itself.

Pros and cons by type of academy

Weekly: small amounts, constant contact

This works well when your families earn weekly income, or when you prefer small fees that weigh less on the household budget.

• Upside: balances never grow too large; if a family misses a week, the gap is small and easy to spot.
• Downside: you generate more charges per month, which means more payments to record and more follow-up for your admin staff.

Biweekly: matching payday

In many countries, salaries are still paid twice a month, and this cadence lines up with that calendar. It is a natural fit for academies whose families live on a salary.

• Upside: charges arrive when there is cash on hand, and two fixed dates per month are easy to communicate and remember.
• Downside: the dates are the same for everyone, regardless of when each family enrolled; if you would rather spread collections across the month, you lose that flexibility.

Monthly: the lowest-friction option

This is the cadence with the fewest moving parts: one charge per family per month, on the day you choose for each one.

• Upside: fewer charges to supervise, and you can stagger billing days across families to spread cash flow through the month.
• Downside: each charge is larger, so a missed payment hurts more; pair it with timely reminders.

Different cadences can coexist in one academy

You do not have to commit to a single option. Because the cadence lives on each parent's profile, you can run all three at once:

• Each family receives one consolidated charge with a breakdown per child and per concept, even with siblings in different categories.
• The system never duplicates charges within the same period, no matter how many cadences you run in parallel.
• A parent without an assigned cadence simply gets no automatic charges: you decide who enters the billing engine and who is handled separately.

There is one requirement for the engine to work: a payment concept of each cadence's type must exist with its price configured. The built-in concepts start at $0, so set your prices before turning cadences on.

A checklist for deciding

1. How do your families earn their income? Weekly, biweekly or monthly: the closer your billing matches their income, the less overdue debt you carry.
2. How much time can you spend on follow-up? More charges per month means more payments to record and more reminders.
3. How hard does a missed payment hit you? Monthly fees leave a bigger gap; weekly ones surface problems sooner.
4. Do you need fixed or staggered dates? Biweekly locks in the 15th and the 30th; monthly lets you pick the day per family.

A common strategy is to set a standard cadence for most families and adjust case by case: since the setting is per parent, no manual workarounds are needed.

What you need to get started

Billing with cadences is available from Cantera Soccer's Basic plan ($39.99 USD per month, up to 40 players, with 1 administrator, 1 coordinator and 3 coaches, and unlimited parents). The Amateur plan ($49.99 USD per month, up to 80 players) adds printable tickets and PDF receipts, and the Pro plan ($59.99 USD per month, unlimited players) adds WhatsApp payment reminders matched to each family's cadence, with 300 messages per cycle.

You can try any plan free for 15 days, no credit card required: assign cadences to a group of families and watch a full week of automatic generation before you decide.