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 clubs in instalments. This automates the credit checking significantly, and forces partents to pay the first month up-front, as well as directing them to pay for each future month's bookings up-front (instead of bookings being attended without having been paid for) while allowing parents to spread the cost. 
• 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. This is entirely to help save hours of school office time, and becaue the AI can talk in almost any language, it will be a significant help to parents who sometimes struggle to communicate with the school.
  You can learn more and listen to a 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, helping provide a deeper understanding of their 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.
• 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.
• 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, busses, 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 strangth requirements for staff logins.

Bug fixes:

• 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.
• Schools can change the capacity of wraparound clubs up to a higher level, whereas they couldn't before.
• The 'book' buttons in the wraparound clubs can only be clicked once now.
• The 'Download Appointment Overview' spreadsheet now works with parents' evenings that have teachers offering different appointment lengths. 
• The Print button on the Manage Attendancde page now prints the web page.

What's next?

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

• Admins will be able to book events, clubs and wraparounds and add the cost to a parent's debt more easily.
• 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).
• Improvements to our Arbor data sync, adding some new features and capabilities.
• 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.
• Two-Phase Booking features for wraparound child care clubs.
• Allow schools that use Xporter to import pre-admission students.
• Better remittance advice and downloadable transactions reports for 'payouts'.
• More advanced refund (automatically and manually) functionality.