By Paolo Dona — Jan 23, 2012
As covered in a previous post, NiftySchool allows you to track outstanding payments from your students.
Many schools record a number of future payments in one go, so that they can track when each installment is due and their total amount.
This happens often for students who are enrolled for a long period of time and don’t want to pay the whole course upfront.
For example a student enrolled for six months might pay in six separate installments, once a month.
While tracking these payments is possible, the process of recording future installments is a tedious task if you need to enter each single payment manually.
Today we’re releasing a new ‘Multiple Installment’ feature that allows you to create a series of payments quickly.
In order to create a new series of payments, browse to a student’s file, and click the ‘Multiple Installments’ button in the Payments section:
In the following screen you can choose how many installments you need, total amounts and other default values:
Once the basic details are complete, the system will let you review each payment to amend dates, amounts and so on.
You can also mark some of the installments as already paid (useful for example to mark the first installment as paid straight away):
Once you’re happy with the details, click on ‘Confirm & Save’ to record the payments. They will appear in the student file like any other payment you’ve taken so far:
In the example above the first payment was marked as ‘paid’, so you can clearly see what’s still outstanding.
Installments are automatically recorded with a series number (eg: 1 of 3) to help you identify them in the future.
This new feature should speed up repetitive data entry, we hope you find this useful!
As usual, for any feedback/suggestions feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.
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By Paolo Dona — Jan 17, 2012
With the move to the new datacenter out of the way, we are resuming implementations, new features and tweaks on NiftySchool.
The first change regards NiftySchool’s monthly invoices.
By default, the system creates invoices with the “Bill to” section preset to your school name, plus the name of the administrator, for example “Bill to: English Institute – Paolo Dona”.
This may not be ideal in the following scenarios:
- Your trading name differs from your company’s name
- You want to specify additional information, such as tax references
- You want to change the name of the person billed
We just released an update, so that you can specify your own billing information, that will be used in your invoices.
Update your billing information in your ‘Account’ section:
And your invoices will reflect the change accordingly:
For any other billing questions or suggestions feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.
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By Paolo Dona — Jan 11, 2012
Hello and happy new year!
At the end of last year we’ve been busy upgrading the internal architecture of NiftySchool.
We’ve been updating libraries and the web framework we use (Ruby on Rails 3) in preparation of a move to a new, faster data center.
While the update caused some discomfort as we had to freeze the codebase and postpone some of the features we planned, it was necessary to guarantee adequate system performance to our growing customer base.
The new architecture will allow us to support you better and scale the system up as we expand our business in 2012.
The migration will take place on:
Sunday 15 January 2012, starting from 6:00 AM UTC
The interruption should last about two hours, but the new servers might not be available for up to 24 hours (due to DNS propagation delays).
During the migration you may experience intermittent access to the system and we suggest not to plan any work on the system for the day.
No intervention is required on your part, your data will be backed up and automatically moved to the new servers so that you can resume your work as usual on Monday morning. You should notice an increased responsiveness of the website as soon as the migration is over.
As a backup measure, we will also keep the old servers active for a couple of weeks so that we can roll back immediately if needs be.
Should you have any questions about the migration, feel free to get in touch sending an email to info@niftyschool.com.
Thanks for your continued support & we hope this change will make NiftySchool more enjoyable than ever!
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By Paolo Dona — Nov 11, 2011
Many schools allow their students to pay in multiple instalments.
Requiring students to pay the full course upfront is safer for the school, but it is not always applicable.
For example students who enroll in long courses, or students who apply for a Visa might not be able to pay the full amount upfront, and prefer to split the payment in multiple smaller payments over time.
As a school manager, you want to make sure all outstanding payments are tracked correctly and are not forgotten.
NiftySchool can help you do exactly that thanks to its outstanding payments feature.
1. Mark payments as ‘outstanding’
When recording a payment, you can mark it as ‘outstanding’. Use the options at the bottom of the payment form to mark a payment as paid or outstanding.
You can quickly schedule a future payment by setting the payment date field to a date in the future.
Once you have marked a payment as outstanding, it will appear in its own section in the student’s file.
This helps you quickly identify which payments have been made and which ones are still pending.
Also a split total will help you work out how much money is still due.
Every outstanding payment will be marked with a yellow warning sign on the right hand side.
If you move your mouse over the warning icon, a popup will give you details about the outstanding payment. For example it will tell you if the payment is due in the future or if it’s overdue (in which case, you may want to notify the student).
2. Check all of your outstanding payments
Seeing the outstanding payments in the student’s file is useful when the student is in front of you at the reception desk.
In order to process all of the outstanding payments, though, you would need a single place in which they’re all listed regardless of the students involved.
This can be done from the general Payments tab; Click on the ‘change filter’ link by the payment dates to open the search box.
You can specify if you want only paid payments, only outstanding ones or all of them.
The date filters allow you to differentiate overdue payments (date in the past) from future instalments.
All of the filtered results can always be downloaded in Excel format, by clicking on the ‘download .xls’ link.
3. Get notified when payments are due
Now that all of your outstanding payments are nicely recorded into the system, you need to make sure you don’t forget about them.
NiftySchool helps you with alerts that are automatically generated and shown in your dashboard and Alerts section at the right time.
There are four different types of alerts related to payments:
Due payments:
An alert is shown a week before an outstanding payment is due (based on the payment date).
For example, if a payment is due on October 15th, you will be notified on October 8th.
Overdue payments:
An additional alert is shown on the payment date, if still outstanding.
Expiring payments:
An alert is shown when the period covered by a payment is coming to an end (a week before the end date).
If you have a payment covering from Oct 15th to Dec 15th, you will be notified on Dec 8th, so that you don’t forget to make arrangements for the next payment.
Expired payments:
An alert is shown after the period covered by a payment has come to an end. E.g.: after Dec 15th, following the previous example.
So to recap: ‘Due’ and ‘Overdue’ payment alerts are based on the payment due date, whilst ‘Expiring’ and ‘Expired’ payment alerts are based on the end date of a payment period.
You can decide which alerts you want to receive from the Configuration/Alerts section.
By default they are all switched on, but you can turn them off if you find there are too many of them (when payments are concerned we think it’s better to be notified than risking to forget something).
You can learn more about the alerts system watching this brief video tutorial
Conclusions:
By correctly tracking outstanding payments and using NiftySchool’s built-in alerts system, you can make sure no payment slips through the net, and you can be automatically notified when new instalments are due.
We hope you enjoy this feature. If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.
Enjoy!
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By Paolo Dona — Nov 03, 2011
Today we’re releasing a little new feature: support for generic documents.
Until now NiftySchool only allowed you to upload documents for your students. From today you can also upload generic documents that are not strictly related to a student.
This can be useful to store price lists, contract templates, letter templates and other documents that you may want to share with your staff.
In order to upload generic documents go to the main Documents tab and click on the ‘Add generic document’ button on the right-hand side.
You can assign the document to a category as you do for student documents, and you can quickly filter files using the menu on the right-hand side, so it’s easy, for example, to look up all of your templates:
All NiftySchool accounts come with unlimited storage space, so there’s no limit to the number of files you can upload.
We hope you find this new feature useful, feel free to send your comments and suggestions to info@niftyschool.com.
Enjoy!
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