Summer 2025 Product Update

You deserve nice things, so here are some new features!

• Dashboard > Options > Print, Email and View Teacher Schedules now has a new option on its Control Panel named "Download Booking Overview (.xlsx)" which creates a spreadsheet of the parents' evening, showing the teachers along one axis and the appointment times down the other, so that at a glance the reader can see which student is booked with which teacher at which time. Great for the person planning the parents' evening or managing the reception desk on the day.
• Microsoft SSO for parents is now available for all schools' parent login pages.
• New Club Booking Methodology: Clubs can now be set up to use one of two booking methodologies: "First come, first served", and a new "Parents request places" mode. The latter prevents parents booking clubs immediately - instead, they will request a place for their student(s), and later Admin users will review and approve or deny places. Confirmed places are emailed to parents immediately upon approval.
• The "Chase Parents" page now has more tools and allows you to exclude parents who were not invited.
• We have added the day of the week to the parent Dashboard, to make it easier to see which date parents' evenings, events and clubs take place on.
• Schools can now add a charge code to events, clubs or wraparounds they create, which can be exported in financial reports.
• We now show students' Leaver Dates, where known, and also flag where students/parents were created manually by the Admin. This all helps with managing Leavers and end-of-year data cleanses.
• "Remember this device for 30 days" setting added to the multi-factor authentication login process.
• You can now search an event, club or wrapround's Manage Attendance page for a single student (like you can for parents' evenings).
• Teachers/staff who have an event, club or wraparound assigned to them can now take its attendance from their Dashboard apge, using Options > Manage Attendance.
• When parents cancel a paid-for booking, an email which tells the school Admins this now includes more details about the cancelled bookings.
• Wraparound changes:
  • Wraparound clubs now have their own dedicated 'section' in Parents Booking (rather than being mixed in with standard clubs, as before). Schools who use the wrapround module will notice a new new left-menu option for it, and parents will find wraparounds in their own section as shown in the screenshot to the right. This makes them easier to find, and gives them their own 'presence'.
  • The parents' wraparound booking page is being updated to make the booking UX even easier. A new feature released today includes the number of available places each day, which is now shown in the calendar of dates. In the next update, coming soon, we'll make the selecting of sessions/students, for wraparounds with multiple sessions, even clearer/easier by changing the UI a little.
• Bug fixes:
  • Teachers' appointment schedule emails now contain appointments that have been shared from a different teacher's schedule.
  • Video meetings now say the parents' names, not "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" as was the case previously.
  • Error messages which might show on the Create Parents' Evening page have been made clearer.
  • Small improvement made to the parent import priority/logic for schools using Wonde.
  • User-defined fields and secondary IDs can now be imported from Wonde (used for financial reports typically).
  • A bug affecting two parent invite pages which stopped Admins being able to select to send to just Main Contacts easily has been squahsed.
  • A change of logic to the limit for how many clubs a student can be signed up to, so that this limit is not impacted by wraparound bookings, has been added.
  • The amount due to be refunded to a parent is now more clear on the Payment Transactions page.

What's next?

Because idle hands make for mischief, we're already working on the below, and more, for our next software release:

• Parent login option with a magic link.
• More/advanced pricing options for wraparounds.
• Book now and pay later option for parents.
• More tools to manage payments and debtors, for events, clubs and wraparounds.
• Allow schools that use Xporter to import pre-admission students.
• An iSAMS Finance export/report.
• Sign in with Apple single sign-on