Why every payment waits for a tap
An assistant that can pay school fees on your behalf would be more convenient and much worse. Here is the reasoning.
The most requested thing we do not do is pay things automatically. It comes up in almost every conversation: the invoice arrives, Leila has already checked it against last term, she knows the account — why does a parent have to tap?
It is a fair question and the convenience would be real. Here is why we still will not.
A wrong payment is not a wrong summary
Most of what an assistant gets wrong is cheap. A summary that misses a nuance costs you thirty seconds of reading the original. A payment that goes to the wrong place, or goes twice, or goes for the wrong amount, costs a phone call, a week, and sometimes a relationship with the school office.
And the failure is asymmetric. If she declines to pay something, you find out and pay it. If she pays something she should not have, you find out later, and the money has already gone.
Invoice fraud is a real thing in school inboxes
Parent mailing lists are a known target. A message that looks like the school office, in the middle of fee season, asking for payment to a slightly different account, is one of the oldest frauds there is — and it works precisely because it arrives when a legitimate invoice was expected.
An assistant with standing authority to pay would be the ideal target for that attack. The tap is not friction; it is the place where a human notices that the account number changed.
What she does instead
She reads the invoice, matches it against what you paid last time, and flags the difference: a new line, a changed amount, a different account. She fills in whatever reference the school wants. She puts the deadline in your calendar with a reminder early enough to be useful.
All of which means the tap takes about three seconds and you are tapping with the comparison already in front of you — which is a good deal more than most people do when paying a school invoice today.
The same logic, everywhere else
Payments are the clearest case but the rule generalises. Anything signed, anything sent in your name, anything that changes a child's medical record: all irreversible, all waiting for you. We wrote the list into the terms of service rather than a help page so that it is a commitment rather than a current behaviour.
An assistant you have to supervise is not much of an assistant. But an assistant that can spend your money while you are not looking is not one either, and of the two mistakes only one of them is yours to pay for.