New! Attendance “Power Entry” Page
Do you use attendance cards at your academy? If so, recording attendance just got a lot easier. And faster.
We’ve just released a new feature called “Attendance Power Entry”. Here’s what it looks like:
New Attendance Power Entry
This new page allows you to rip through an entire stack of attendance cards in a very short time. It does NOT replace the old way of recording attendance (by clicking a blue link next to a student’s name). It’s an additional option for you.
To get to this page, click the “Attendance Power Entry” link in the Students sidebar:
How to Use the New Attendance Power Entry Screen
On this page you enter two pieces of info: a date and a student number. Click in the date field and a calendar will pop up. Like so:
Then enter a student’s number. You can find this number on a student’s detail page in the upper right hand corner:
In this example, the Student ID is “3605″. This is the number you enter in the “student number” field.
(Helpful hint: If you use attendance cards, go through your students one-by-one and jot this number on the back of each card. Then when you’re ready to record attendance for the day, turn the cards over and rip through them.)
You can also choose days in the past. Once you set a date, it doesn’t change. This means you can enter a stack of cards for yesterday, then switch the date to today and enter that stack of cards.
Using this screen, our beta testers found that they were able to enter an entire stack of attendance cards in less than a minute!
This will greatly speed up your attendance process. I hope it’s useful to you!
Hi Chris,
Long time no talk. Hope all is well with you and your family. Really loving npower entry. What a timesaver. I wanted to revisit a couple ideas and see what your thoughts were.
1) Batch tuition entry. I rely 100% on student base reports for sending tuition statements. One drawback is when pending tuitions run out I do not always know about it. This is two part I guess. First the ability to add to new students or existing students multiple months of tuition at a time. 12 payments due the same date each month entered at same time. Second the ability to generate a report of students with no payments remaining or one payment remaining. This would eliminate students falling throught the cracks and not paying for a month or two.
2) Printing out the payment history for whole student base for a specific date range. Firlds would be student name – amount – date – description. date range such as 2/1/11 – 2/28/11 or 2/14/11 – 2/20/11. This would help in figuring taxes and doing weekly deposits for the school.
3. Statements – this would be the biggest help. Remember please allow for modification of autogenerated statements. perhaps as a word documents.
Thanks Chris,
Jim Wade
Hi Chris,
Another idea…Searching for a parent last name in student base. We have a drop box for payments. Sometimes people leave tuition checks on the counter. Other times our front desk employee, when busy, takes a payment from someone who does not want to wait in line and “drops and runs). Anyway, over half of all new students have different last names than their parents. In some families there are 3 or 4 last names with kids from 2 prior families now brothers and sisters.
To save the hastle of pulling a paper file to try and locate a parent last name, could we use the student base search feature and target the last name of parents? This may sound trivial but it is a big deal here. I have a large latino and eastern euorpean studen base.
Thanks
Jim Wade
I think I mentioned this one Chris…Can the search return for “past due” students NOT include inactive students???This will make the list much shorter. I do not want to clear their balance because some come back months later, pay their balance, and start classes again.
Thanks again,
Jim Wade
Wow sorry Chris,
I’m doing lots of catch up stuff and I see little things. Could you add the “past due date” on the list of information that prints for past due students…How does this sound…like e-mail blasts, could a students e-mail address receive an auto notificationwhen their account becomes past due? This might be better used as user initiated rather than auto-sent which might be annoying if un warranted and possibly cause a family to get angry. Would this be the same as the idea for opening an e-mail window from a student screen to send a good job note to a single student rather than a blast. This might work to send individuals notices their tuition is past due and we could add notes like “Can’t wait to see Jordan at the tournament this weekend! His weapons form is awesome!!”
Jim Wade