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The ten hours you sold two years ago are still on your books
Selling ten hours up front is the best thing a driving school can do for its cash flow. It is also a liability, in the plain accounting sense: you have the money and you still owe the work.
The appeal is obvious. A package converts one nervous parent into ten lessons and pays for the term in advance. Almost every school sells them, and almost every school tracks them badly.
The usual method is a notebook, a spreadsheet, or the instructor's memory. All three work fine at twenty students. At eighty they produce the phone call every owner recognises: “we bought ten, we've done six, but she says it was seven.” There is no way to win that conversation from a notebook.
A balance is a ledger, not a counter
This is the technical mistake underneath most of the mess. If you keep a number and decrement it, you can never answer “where did the hours go?” — and that is the only question anyone ever asks.
Kept as a list of entries instead — bought ten, used one on the 3rd, used one on the 10th, one returned when the 17th was cancelled in time, one burned on the 24th when nobody came — the balance is the sum, and every line explains itself. The number and the explanation stop being two separate things you have to reconcile.
Three decisions you have to make on purpose
Does it expire? Both answers are defensible. No expiry is simple and honest, and it means ten hours sold in 2026 can be claimed in 2029 by a student who has forgotten your name. An expiry caps the liability but has to be stated clearly before purchase, not discovered afterwards.
Does a no-show burn an hour? Most schools say yes, and it is defensible — the instructor and the car were there. But it has to be written down before it happens, because the moment to explain the rule is not the moment you apply it.
Can siblings share? Families ask constantly, and the honest answer for most schools is yes. The awkward part is defining a family in a way software can check without inventing a concept nobody uses. The guardian's email is usually enough, and it is a thing you already have.
The accounting bit, briefly
Money taken for lessons not yet given is generally deferred revenue rather than income, which matters at year end and matters more if you are ever valuing or selling the business. Whether and when it becomes recognisable income when a package expires unused is precisely the sort of question your accountant is for.
What you can do without an accountant is know the number. A school that cannot say how many pre-paid hours it owes is a school that cannot answer a basic question about its own balance sheet.
This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Rules differ by state and change; confirm your own obligations with an attorney or a CPA who works in yours.
What this means for your website
Credit is held in minutes as a ledger, not a counter, so a student's balance is the sum of entries and every one of them says where it went. That is the screen the phone call is about.
Expiry is optional per package — blank means no expiry, because a school that does not want one should not have to invent it. Whether a no-show or a late cancellation uses up an hour is a setting, and family sharing is a checkbox that matches siblings by the guardian's email.