published on Aug 30, 2010 by Paolo Dona
Cash flow is very important for small and big schools alike, especially in a recession time.
Getting paid is vital to your business, but many schools do not have a system in place to check which students need to pay their fees and when.
Sometimes it’s difficult to track precisely when students have to pay. Some schools are very strict and only enrol students who have paid for the entire course upfront, but others are more flexible and need to remember when a payment is due.
From today NiftySchool allows you to be always on top of your due payments with two new Alerts:
- Payment is due: triggered seven days before a payment expires
- Payment overdue: triggered when the paid period comes to an end
Alerts will be shown in your Dashboard, in the student’s page and in the Alerts section.
These new alerts are based on the last ‘Paid up to’ date specified in the student’s payments. If the student makes a new payment, the alert will disappear automatically from the following day.
Also, only active students (or trial ones) will be taken into account. No false alerts are generated for students who have finished their courses.
Make sure you populate the ‘Paid up to’ field in your payments if you want the alerts to be triggered.
Note that this new feature may generate a large amount of alerts, especially if you have a large number of students.
If you find yourself checking too many alerts or you just don’t need them, feel free to turn them off from the configuration page.
Alerts can be enabled and disabled individually from the configuration screen.
published on Aug 25, 2010 by Paolo Dona
NiftySchool allows you to store a large amount of data about your students. You can specify contact details, personal information, visa status, how they heard about your school, past education and so on.
The amount of information you can enter in the student form can be overwhelming, and can slow you down when all you want to do is just register a student.
We simplified the “new student” screen so that you only need to specify the bare minimum information, and can complete the task as quickly as possible.
You can now insert students in a snap, all additional details can be filled in at a later stage from his dashboard page.
We also improved the way you add students to the classes. From the class register page you can add new students and enroll them in one go, or select from the ones already in the system.
This is very useful when you’re moving students around, or when you just opened a new class.
From the class register screen you can add new students and specify their enrollment details.
If you are just moving students around, you can add them to the register typing part of their name and selecting from the dropdown.
These tiny updates make NiftySchool easier and faster to use. Hope you enjoy the update!
published on Aug 24, 2010 by Paolo Dona
A few weeks ago, we released the new alerts feature.
Alerts are useful. They let you know when you need to take care of a specific issue—for example, when a student has low attendance, or her visa is about to expire.
Alerts are shown in a list using easy-to-spot colour codes.
We’ve updated the alerts system to make it easier to use:
1) You can now mark an alert as ‘checked’
As your alert list grows, it becomes annoying to have to scan through the list to find those requiring action. Alerts can now be marked as ‘checked’, after which they will no longer appear in your list.
Once you have dealt with the alert, mark it as checked ticking off the checkbox on the left hand side.
We will record who has checked the alerts and when.
Checked alerts are archived and hidden from your list. You can always see who has checked what and when by following the ‘show checked’ link in the upper right-hand corner.
This will keep your alert list tidy and allow you to only focus on what remains outstanding.
2) Alerts are shown in your dashboards
The database is checked automatically every night, and new alerts are generated when appropriate.
To ensure that you don’t miss important notifications, the top five alerts are shown in your dashboard. These are the first things you will see when you log in.
Similarly, student-specific alerts are shown on the students’ dashboard.
3) Create your custom alerts
NiftySchool covers a number of standard alerts, including visa expiry dates, low attendance, courses expiring, and so on.
More alerts will be added over time. It is likely that you will have specific needs that aren’t covered by the platform. The good news is that you can create your own alerts.
Custom alerts work like appointments in a calendar. You specify a description and a due date and the system will notify you on the given day.
In this way, you can, for example, check a student’s progress halfway through his course, remind your staff to make an important phone call, or confirm an appointment.
You can create and view your custom alerts from the Alerts tab, following the ‘Custom Alerts’ link.
We hope you enjoy the updates. Please feel free to tell us about the alerts that would be useful for your school.
published on Aug 12, 2010 by Paolo Dona
You want to use NiftySchool but you are outside of the UK?
No problem: NiftySchool can be used from all over the world and there are no limitations.
As of today we also added support for a number of currencies that weren’t yet supported.
Go to your Account page and choose the currency you want to use from the following dropdown:
The chosen currency will be used throughout the whole system (eg: payments section).
Note: your monthly subscription will remain in British Pounds and converted to your credit card currency at every billing cycle.
If you need a currency that is not listed in the dropdown feel free to let us know, it takes us just a few minutes to add a new one!
published on Aug 06, 2010 by Paolo Dona
NiftySchool allows you to check student attendance percentages. This figure checks the number of attended hours against the expected attendance, so that you can spot students whose attendance drops below a certain threshold.
By default, the attendance page computes the percentage based on all of the student’s current and past enrolments. If the student enrolled years ago and then returned to the school recently, all of his enrolments will be taken into account.
In these cases, what you may really wish to see is the attendance over a specific period of time, such as, the last month or the current enrolment period.
We’ve added a date filter to the attendance page so you can easily do that.
When you filter by date, the calendar will only show the selected period and all of the figures will be updated accordingly.
NiftySchool is a Web-based management software for language schools.
We were tired to see how bad softwares for language schools were, and decided to build a new tool which is slick, easy to use and affordable.
You can
try it out for free, we would love to know what you think about it.
