Summer 2026 Product Update

It's a pleasure to bring you news of these great new features:

• Pay in Instalments: Parents can now pay for their wraparound (breakfast/after-school) clubs in instalments. This automates the credit checking significantly. Parents are required to pay the first month's value up-front, while allowing them to pay for each future month's bookings later, up-front (instead of bookings being attended without having been paid for), which parents will appreciate, with the cost being spread out. 
• Remittances are now easily reviewed and re-sent from the Remittances tab in the Finance section of the admin area. Your school/LA/MAT can also download its fees invoice and a list of transactions from the same web page.
• AI Agent for wraparound clubs: We have released a telephone number which parents can call to book, cancel or change their breakfast and/or after-school club bookings, as well as be able to ask other pertinent questions e.g. what they owe for future bookings. This is entirely to help save hours of school office time, and because the AI Agent can talk in almost any language, it will be a significant help to parents who struggle to communicate with the school, or are not particularly IT literate.
  You can learn more and listen to a quick demonstration here.
• Council/Multi-Academy Portal: Local authorities and multi-academy trusts can now login to a portal which will provide statistics on their schools' Parents Booking accounts' meetings and bookings, while showing return on investment and other statistics. The intention is to help provide better oversight and a deeper understanding of schools' Parents Booking usage.
• School Admin users who have an account for multiple schools will now be asked which they want to login to when they login.
• Choose how close before a wraparound club booking parents are allowed to book it.
• A new refund policy feature for events, clubs and wraparounds, that will either automatically refund or credit the value of bookings which were cancelled in enough time (which is a separate setting). 
• Schools using the Parents Booking payment gateway will see that parents with a credit balance can now use this to make up-front payments much more easily.
• New 'Manage Attendance' page for wraparound clubs, which shows a summary of the bookings in each session and then, in differently-coloured tables, shows the bookings for each session. It's now even easier to take attendance and we also show more information here.
• The Debtors page now shows when the last debt was paid more clearly.
• iSAMS Staff single sign-on (SSO): Schools that use iSAMS can add a single sign-on button to their iSAMS that will let staff login to Parents Booking in one click.
• MySchoolPortal Parent single sign-on (SSO): Similarly, schools that use MSP can have parents login to Parents Booking in one click via a new single sign-on we have recently released.
• A new calendar booking interface for wraparound clubs which makes it even easier to book wraparound clubs.
• Schools can up-sell 'extras' such as snacks, lunches, buses, tutors and more to parents during wraparound club bookings/payments. This is a fantastic and novel solution for schools who either way to help parents book Extras of this type more eaisly and/or are looking for new ways to generate increased revenue.
• A better, easier-to-use date/session/cost/capacity interface when creating or editing wraparound clubs.
• You can now have different capacities for each wraparound session, rather than having to have the same capacity for all sessions.
• We've upgraded the password strength requirements for staff logins.
• Wraparound clubs have a new "Download Weekly Bookings" spreadsheet in Dashboard > Options > List of Bookings which provides a brilliant weekly overview of attendances for the whole club.

Bug fixes / subtle changes:

• The logic that stopped students from being booked for multiple clubs on the same day has been refined to handle clubs which do not overlap but run on the same day in a more intelligent way.
• You can now add a student to a wraparound club via its attendance web page more easily.
• The 'book' buttons in the wraparound clubs can only be clicked once now.
• iSAMS schools can now prefix their vertical registration classes with a year group, if wanted.
• The 'Download Appointment Overview' spreadsheet now works with parents' evenings that have teachers offering different appointment lengths. 
• The Pay Later Settings web page's search box now searches by student as well as parent name and email.
• The Print button on the Manage Attendance page now prints the web page.
• You can now increase the capacity for wraparound sessions (but you still can't reduce these, for your own safety).
• "Never" and "4 weeks" have been added as options to how close a parent is allowed to cancel wraparound bookings.
• The Payments Received web page is now much faster to load when you have lots of payments.

What's next?

Every day our software developers work on new features for Parents Booking. You can expect the below features to appear in future software releases:

• Integration with the UK Government / HMRC's Tax-Free Child Care API, so that parents can use their balance to pay for wraparound child care. <- Coming late-August 2026
• We'll help schools mark who collects a student from a wraparound club, and at what time (e.g. schools can record attendance and collection data).
• Three new finance reports (for creditors, finance statements and HMRC TFC)
• Two-Phase Booking features for wraparound child care clubs.
• Allow schools that use Xporter to import pre-admission students.
• Schools will archive student, parent and teacher records, rather than hard-delete these, soon, preserving records for longer when there's a legal requirement to do so.
• We'll allow events and clubs to take payment in instalments, like we do with wraparound clubs. We'll also allow special pricing rules to be set up for these.
• A customisable, download-able receipt for Universal Credit users who need to show what they have paid.