Who Collects Your Tuition: Six Billing Companies and Five Ways of Getting Paid
Martial Arts Professional Directory · Billing and payments
Tuition collection is the one vendor decision that touches every dollar the school earns. The six companies below get paid in five completely different ways — and the only one that publishes a full rate card is the one that was never built for martial arts.
Why the model matters more than the price
A school owner comparing billing providers usually asks what the monthly fee is. That is the wrong first question, because the monthly fee is not where most of these companies make their money. Some charge for software and leave payment processing to you. Some make nothing on software and everything on the payments. Some charge a flat service fee for a human team that chases failed cards. The number that matters is the total of all three — subscription, processing, and whatever percentage of collections is taken along the way — measured against your actual monthly tuition volume.
Not one of the five martial arts specialists publishes a complete processing rate card. That is not unusual in payments, but it is worth sitting with: a school owner can find out what a generic small-business processor will charge in about ninety seconds, and cannot find out what any of the industry’s own billing companies will charge without a phone call. This page can tell you what each company charges for software and services, and what each says about how it makes money. Your effective rate has to come from a written quote.
The six companies
| Company | Published price | How it makes money | Trading since | What it publishes about performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EFC Educational Funding Company |
Plans from $299 per month | Software and services subscription in three plans, plus optional extras: managed advertising at $350/month per platform on top of a $500/month minimum ad spend, premium support at $149 or $249 per location per month, and ad-hoc work at $199 a strategy call or $99 a report. No separate setup fee; onboarding included | 1967 | 58 years working exclusively with martial arts schools; runs its own Summit and community programme |
| ASF Payment Solutions | Not published — demo required | Explicitly funded by the payments rather than by software fees. States that it adds no margin on top of processing and passes no surcharge to students, and that the platform is “funded by the payments, not billed per module” | 1973 | Publishes a 95% average client collection rate, with its own caveat that individual results vary and it is not a guarantee |
| Member Solutions | $99 per month billed annually ($199 monthly); $399/$499 for the tier that adds website and digital presence | Flat monthly service fee, explicitly not per member, for a billing team that chases declines and expired cards | 1991 | Claims 11,000+ businesses served and 15–30% more revenue recovered |
| AMS AmeriNational Management Services |
“No monthly fees, no hidden costs, no gotchas” — no rate published | Full-service billing with no software subscription, so the revenue is in the processing and the surrounding services. AMS also sells the ATLAS school management platform, websites, merchant accounts and an after-school programme, which makes it the widest single-vendor bundle in this market | States 40 years serving martial arts schools | Claims a 90% first-contact tuition collection rate, which it describes as 22% higher than its competitors. Neither the base nor the comparison set is published |
| Simple Tuition Management Endorsed by NAPMA and this magazine — see disclosure |
Not published — describes itself as costing “a fraction of a traditional billing company” | Positions itself as a direct processing relationship with “no middle man” rather than a full-service collections business: ACH, cards and online event registration, with funds deposited to the school’s account on settlement rather than held and remitted | Site content dates from 2012–2014 | Publishes no collection rate or school count. States that it is fully PCI compliant |
| PaySimple Not martial-arts-specific |
$79.95 per month, all features included | Software fee plus published processing: card from 2.90% + $0.30 per transaction, ACH and eCheck at 1.00% + $0.30. States that schools processing more than $50,000 a month may qualify for lower rates | 2005 | Publishes no collection rate. Publishes the one thing none of the specialists do — the actual rate |
On $30,000 a month of collected tuition, what will I pay in total — subscription, card rate, ACH rate, and any percentage of collections — and will you put that in writing? PaySimple has already answered it in public: roughly $950 a month on cards, or about $380 on ACH, plus the $79.95 fee. That is not a recommendation, and a generic processor does nothing to chase a failed payment. It is a benchmark. Any specialist quoting you above it is charging for the service layer, and you are entitled to ask what that layer actually does.
Five ways of getting paid
Subscription for software and services — EFC
You pay a monthly plan fee and the company supplies a platform plus a service layer around it. EFC has been doing this longer than anyone else in the industry: it was founded in 1967 and has worked exclusively with martial arts schools throughout, which makes it part of the infrastructure the profession was built on rather than a recent entrant. The published extras are worth pricing before you commit — advertising management and premium support are each a meaningful addition to the $299 base.
Funded by the payments — ASF, AMS
No software fee at all: the company earns from processing the tuition it collects. The attraction is obvious, and so is the thing to check. Ask what the processing rate actually is, because the software being free tells you nothing about whether the rate is competitive. ASF states publicly that it adds no margin on top of processing and passes no surcharge to students; AMS states that there are no monthly fees, no hidden costs and no gotchas. Both are specific claims, and both are worth asking to see written into the agreement rather than left on a website.
Flat fee for a human team — Member Solutions
The pitch is not software, it is labour: a team that works your failed payments so the front desk does not have to. Flat rate regardless of size, which makes it proportionally cheapest for a large school. The value depends entirely on how much revenue you are currently losing to declines, which is a number you can work out before any sales call.
Direct processing without the collections layer — Simple Tuition Management
A deliberately narrower proposition: take the recurring payment, deposit it, and leave the chasing to the school. Simple Tuition Management makes the point explicitly, describing itself as having no middle man and depositing funds on settlement rather than holding and remitting them. That is a real structural difference from the full-service model, and it cuts both ways. A school with strong front-desk discipline and a low decline rate is paying a full-service company for work it is already doing itself. A school that is not on top of declines is buying exactly the labour it needs. Know which school you are before you choose. Note that the site’s published content dates from 2012 to 2014, so confirm current terms, rates and PCI standing directly rather than from the page.
Generic small-business processing — PaySimple and its peers
Nothing about martial arts tuition is technically special: it is a recurring monthly charge against a card or a bank account, which is the most commoditised product in payments. General-purpose recurring-billing platforms will do it, and they publish their rates because they compete on them. What they do not do is know what a belt test is, integrate with your attendance records, understand a family plan or a freeze, or telephone a parent whose card expired. That gap is the whole argument for the specialists — and pricing a generic processor first is the only way to find out what the specialists are charging you for it.
What to establish in writing
- The full rate. Card rate, ACH rate, and any percentage of collected revenue, stated separately.
- Who holds the money, and for how long. When does collected tuition reach your account — on settlement, or after the provider has remitted?
- What happens to a decline. Automatic retry, human follow-up, or a report you have to act on yourself. The difference is real money at scale, and it is the main thing you are paying a full-service company for.
- Chargebacks and disputes. Who handles them, and at what cost?
- Contract length, notice period and exit. Billing is the hardest vendor to leave; know the terms before you are in them.
- Bundling. If the billing company also supplies your software, website and after-school programme, establish what leaving costs across all of them, not just the billing.
- Your data on exit. Student records, payment history and signed agreements should leave with you in a usable format.
- Who owns the member agreements. This matters if you ever sell the school.
Methodology
Every figure was read from the company’s own published website on 9 September 2026 — pricing pages, FAQ pages and product pages — not from third-party round-ups and not from the companies themselves. Where a company does not publish a price, the table says so rather than estimating one.
Performance claims — collection rates, revenue recovered, businesses served, years trading — are reproduced as the companies state them and attributed to them. Martial Arts Professional has not audited any of them.
AMS, Simple Tuition Management and PaySimple were added at the request of readers. Each was then researched from its own website only and is reported as found, on the same terms as every other entry — including where that reporting is unflattering.
No company was contacted before publication, given advance sight of this page, or invited to review it. Corrections are published under our editorial policy, with the date and the change noted.
Disclosure
One relationship on this page has to be named. NAPMA and Martial Arts Professional have endorsed Simple Tuition Management, and Simple Tuition Management displays that endorsement on its own website. It is listed here because it serves this market, and its row is written to the same standard as every other — including the notes that it publishes no price and that its site content has not been refreshed since 2014. Readers should weigh the endorsement accordingly.
Beyond that, Martial Arts Professional has no advertising, affiliate or referral relationship with any company listed on this page and receives no commission on anything a reader buys. No fee was accepted for inclusion or for position, and the table is ordered by business model rather than by preference.
The magazine is published by NAPMA, the National Association of Professional Martial Artists, whose CEO and Chairman, Grand Master Stephen Oliver, also founded Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a coaching company for school owners. If a commercial relationship ever exists between any of those organisations and a company listed here, it will be named in that company’s row, as it is above.
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