Stop chasing missed payments. Generate compliant pain.008 XML files, upload to your bank, settle hundreds of installments in minutes.
Why SEPA matters for a dance school
If your school is in the Eurozone (or anywhere in the SEPA area: 36 countries, 500 million potential payers), SEPA Direct Debit is the cheapest, most reliable way to collect recurring payments. No card fees. No payment links to chase. No Stripe percentages. Once a student signs a SEPA mandate, you can pull payments directly from their bank account — automatically, on the date you decide, for as long as the mandate is active.
The catch? Generating SEPA-compliant XML files manually is a nightmare. Dance Master Pro does it for you in three clicks.
How it works
When a student enrolls, you collect their IBAN and SEPA mandate signature once. Dance Master Pro stores this securely and uses it for every future installment. When it’s time to bill — whether for a single course, an AYCD plan, or an event ticket — you go to the SEPA Preview page, see the grid of every cell that’s payable (and not yet paid, invoiced, or already exported), tick the ones you want to collect, set the collection date, and click “Generate XML.”
The system produces a pain.008.001.02 file — the standard SEPA Direct Debit XML format that every European bank accepts. You download it, upload it to your bank’s portal, and the bank takes care of the rest. Two business days later your account is credited and Dance Master Pro automatically marks those installments as paid.
Three views, one logic
You can run a SEPA collection from any of the four payment views:
- Class view: collect installments for a specific course (e.g. all October fees for “Beginner Ballet Tuesday”)
- AYCD view: collect monthly fees from your all-you-can-dance members
- Event view: collect ticket fees from event registrations (perfect for end-of-year shows, intensives, summer camps)
- Student view: see the full picture per student across everything they owe
Each view has its own colour code (blue for class, green for student, purple for AYCD, orange for event) and the SEPA Preview always shows you only the cells that are actually collectable — paid cells stay green, invoiced cells stay blue, and cells already in an active SEPA export are greyed out so you never collect twice.
What happens when a payment fails
In the real world, sometimes a payment bounces — insufficient funds, expired mandate, account closed. Dance Master Pro handles this gracefully. After your bank notifies you, you go back to the export, click on the failed cell, and mark it as “Payment not completed.” That cell is immediately freed up: the student appears in the next SEPA Preview, ready to be billed again, while the rest of the export stays settled. The history log shows you exactly which cells were rejected and how much money came in versus what was expected.
You can also confirm collections individually if you process payments piecewise, or confirm an entire export at once after the bank has settled it. Either way, the audit trail is complete: every export keeps its original totals (for traceability) plus the live settled/rejected counts (for accounting reality).
Compliance, by default
Dance Master Pro generates files that follow the SEPA pain.008.001.02 standard, with all the required fields: MsgId, CtrlSum, NbOfTxs, SeqTp (FRST/RCUR/OOFF), MndtId, DtOfSgntr, CdtrSchmeId, ChrgBr, RmtInf. Your creditor identifier and BIC come from your school’s Company Setup. The 5-business-day collection lead time is enforced automatically.
If your school’s currency is set to anything other than EUR, the SEPA option is hidden from the interface — because SEPA is a Euro-only system and we’d rather not show you a button that wouldn’t work.
The bottom line
A school with 100 monthly-billing students saves around 4 hours per month with SEPA versus chasing card payments and bank transfers manually. At Italian average labour rates, that’s about €60 per month, or €720 per year. Dance Master Pro pays for itself with this feature alone.
