Scheduled Emails (Beta)
Last week we talked about our ability to send email via Report Creator. This on-demand feature is very helpful in allowing users to send emails to parents, students and even teachers, based on specific data in a report.
Taking this to another level – we are introducing a related feature called Scheduled Emails. It allows permitted users to create a report and send it at a later time. Still using Report Creator, you build your own report – then set the date and time that the report will be sent out to the specified recipients. The report can be sent once or repeatedly, depending on the schedule you set. For example, you can create an allergy report and send it as an attachment to your school nurse at a specific date.
Another example is to run a daily attendance report that contains those absent for the day, then send an email to the students’ parents – notifying them that their child is absent for the day. Read more…
Schedule Dropdown
For those who wish to print a Schedule that has not been activated yet, QuickSchools has a new dropdown in Private Beta that can be activated for your school. This feature is for the original (and simplified) Scheduling Module, and not for the new Master Scheduler that is currently also in Private Beta.
Here’s what the dropdown looks like from the “Schedule” tab (available for both Students and Teachers):
Please contact support if you’d like this feature to be turned on for your Scheduling module.
Agile Development
At QuickSchools, we believe in continuous improvement for our product (and service). As such, we employ the Agile Development methodology for software development. This means that we make frequent incremental releases that we call Sprints. The industry standard for Sprints is between 1 – 4 weeks. At QuickSchools, our Sprints are about 3 weeks long, give or take.
Improvements that are included in any particular Sprint are prioritized based on demand. So if a a lot of schools want a certain improvement, or if a lot of schools stand to benefit from a certain improvement, we tend to work on those first. Sprints also include general improvements to infrastructure like hardware, network and security upgrades, as well as improvements to performance, availability and data recovery (improvements you don’t necessarily notice over time). But we do try to include functional improvements to each Sprint as well. It’s really the functionality improvements that people notice and pay attention to.
Sprint D7 – May 21, 2018
That being said, we wanted to be a little more transparent with our releases. We had a release earlier this week (labelled Sprint D7) and it contains the following functional improvements: Read more…
Student Tags
Some time ago, QuickSchools introduced a way to tag your students that was in private beta. We’re proud to announce that this feature is now available for all accounts. Just go to “Settings” > “Turn Features On / Off”, and click on the “Configure” link for “Student Tracking”. You should see the following near the bottom of the page (just below “Student notes”):
The tagging functionality is pretty much the same as we had in Private Beta. Add in any text, one tag per line, and it will appear on the main Students Listing. Here’s an example of how to enter the data:
Entering Student Tags on the Student Record
Any text you put in square brackets will appear on the student listing as a code, and any text AFTER the square brackets appears as a description when you mouse over the tag. If you omit the square brackets, the tag will appear as a flag, and you’ll have to mouse over to see the description: Read more…
Send Email from the Report Creator
Need to take action based on a report? Quickschools supports custom reporting that allows you to explore data within your account, and then send emails to parents, students and even teachers, based on the data being reported.
The Report Creator is a flexible reporting tool that allows you to extract data from the various modules that you use within QuickSchools. You can sort columns and filter the result set to fit your requirements. The end result, is a dynamic and fully customized view into relevant areas of your data. Learn more here.
Once you’re happy with a report, you can actually take action from that report. For example, you can generate a report that shows students with more than 3 tardies in the semester – then send email to the parents of these students within the Report Creator’s email mechanism.
The “Email” feature within the Report Creator has full Mail Merge functionality. This means that you can insert text into your email based on the columns being reported in your report. This makes for a very powerful tool, where you can send out notifications to virtually anybody (as long as the email address appears as a column for Mail Merge purposes), based on any scenario that you can generate a report for.
Some other examples of reports that can be useful as a notification:
- Students with more than X disciplinary incidents
- Students who were absent for more than X days
- Parents with outstanding balances in the Fee Tracking module
For more information on sending emails from the Report Creator, see our support article here.
Alternative Methods for Subscription Payments
Due to the nature of the QuickSchools subscription model, we prefer payments to be made automatically via credit card. QuickSchools will invoice schools monthly based on the number of active students in the account (plus any additional Apps). But for schools that do not have a credit card, we do offer alternate means of payment. For these options, you will need to contact QuickSchools support to set things up:
Payment via Bank Account (ACH)
We can currently accept direct ACH payment from US banks (although we are looking to support additional countries soon). If you have not subscribed, you will need to contact QuickSchools to have this feature turned on. However, if you’ve already subscribed, you can just go to your “Account” page, and switch to ACH payments by setting up a Bank Account for subscription payments.
More info here: Read more…
Lunch Ordering App
QuickSchools is proud to announce our new Lunch Ordering app, now available in our App Store. Parents can now easily order student lunches online via the Parent Portal.
Administrators for the app will have full flexibility in setting up meal items, meal prices, along with a daily menu. Parents and students can then select items available from the menu for any given day. The screenshot below shows how Lunch Ordering looks like in Parent Portal:
Lunch Ordering integrates with Fee Tracking for streamlined charging of students. So parents can view charges for their lunch orders via Fee Tracking, and they can also make payments through this module.
For more info about Lunch Ordering, please see our support article here.
We’d love to hear from you. Please chat with us if you have questions!
