An important aspect of the QuickSchools system is the concept of Academic Terms. An academic term is used to manage all subjects/courses that a student is enrolled in within a specific time frame. This containment is important in order to easily manage a group of students that all start/end courses at the same time. It is also important that these academic terms do not overlap, as the system can only support one term to be active at any time.

So what if a school does not have academic terms? There are still courses with multiple students starting and learning together, but some courses run for a week, others for a month, and so on. This is more typical for vocational schools that offer private courses like a Photography School, or a Barber/Beauty School. In this case, we recommend having just ONE academic term, which you can archive on a yearly basis.

This set up works if:

• Students learn together in groups. All students within a course start and end together, but also go through the same curriculum (i.e. not Self-Paced)
• You have courses of varying lengths.
• You want to track students as cohorts, even though the same cohort of students may leave the school at different times (because of the length of their courses)

QuickSchools has been supporting Trade Schools and Vocational schools for many years now, primarily due to the flexibility afforded by our platform. In this article, we’d like to elaborate specifically on setting up your Programs.

Class Setup

When “College-Level Settings” is turned on, you’ll see a new module called “Class Setup”, which displays all the grade levels (relabelled as “year levels” or “classes”):

Depending on your institution, you can repurpose this module to display the program or year levels. For example, you can set up classes as Programs:

For vocational schools, your programs may look like this:

Collecting fees is an important part of the school operations. And although QuickSchools provides an integrated way to collect fees online via Stripe, many schools choose to collect fees via their own payment gateway. When doing this, keeping both systems in sync can be a challenge. So here’s what you can do:

First off, you can use the “Outstanding Balances by Student (For Export)” Summary Report to export all outstanding balances out of QuickSchools in Excel format. Simply search for “Outstanding”, and you should see it:

You should hopefully be able to import the outstanding balances back into your payment gateway, and then charge your students/parents based on the new outstanding balances. Successful payments should create payment transactions (i.e. receipts) within your external system. Finally, you can then export all the payment transactions, and re-import them back into QuickSchools.

If you’re using an external system to manage all payments and fees, and you simply want to display all fees and payments in QuickSchools via the Student and Parent Portal, you could import all transactions as well, but this is a different scenario.