Three things that eat a school owner’s month
1. Receipts families can actually use
Families in education savings and tax-credit programs need itemised receipts: the child, the hours, the dates, the school’s EIN. Building those by hand each month is slow, and a hand-made PDF proves nothing.
How Trifold answers it today (chapter 03, Proof): every Stripe payment gets a receipt signed with your school’s key. It carries the amount, the date, the Stripe invoice and a hash that links the payment to one exact entry in your books, with no names. A family can check it on the verify page, without an account. Stripe’s own invoice, with its lines, stays beside it.
Next: the compliance pack. The signed receipt is a proof of payment, not yet an itemised one. The receipt a state program asks for (provider, expense, amount, date and who paid, per child) is the compliance pack, which isn’t built. It is being designed against each program’s published rules, with a CPA’s review; until a program confirms, we say “designed for”, not “accepted by”.
2. A month that closes from a spreadsheet
Tuition, sibling discounts, refunds and late payments end up in a spreadsheet that one person understands.
How Trifold answers it (chapters 01 and 02, Money in and Books): every Stripe payment lands as an event and posts as balanced books, automatically. Corrections are new events, never edits. At month end you seal the month with one command, and the seal shows any later change. The month that closes itself, with Rifo, is marked Next.
3. A CPA who has to rebuild everything in January
How Trifold answers it: every number traces to the payment behind it. Your CPA gets hledger, Parquet or CSV exports and can replay the events to the same books on their own machine.
What design partners get
- Onboarding from the founder, in person or on a call.
- Free during the pilot.
- A say in the roadmap, starting with the receipt layout for your state’s program.
- Named in a case study only if you want to be.
We’re starting with microschools and private schools in Idaho and Utah.