NiftySchool News And Updates

Filter Teacher Lessons by Date

2012-06-28T00:00:00+01:00

Today we’re releasing a minor update, that should help you to work out how many hours your teachers have done in a given timeframe.

NiftySchool provided a ‘Monthly Summary’ who computed the hours taught based on your classes & timetable, but many schools do not pay teachers based on the calendar month, so we added the abilty to filter that report by specific dates:

Edit the dates under Teachers/Lesson summary, and the system will compute the total amount of hours, and the breakdown per week.

You can also dowload the list of lessons taken into account by clicking on the little printer icon by the total.

We hope you find this update useful. Feel free to send your comments and suggestions to info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

Track Extra Information With Custom Fields

2012-05-21T00:00:00+01:00

Today we’re realasing a tiny update that should make it easier to store more information about your students: custom fields.

Many schools need to track specific data about their students that cannot be generalised and rolled out to all of the NiftySchool customers.

Relevant examples might be: Driving license, country specific IDs (such as CPF/CNPJ and RG in Brazil), payment details and so on.

In order to setup your custom fields, go to the general settings under the configuration tab:

Enter the name of the custom fields you need to set up and save.
If you leave the name blank, no custom field will be created.

Once the names are correctly configured, you will notice that the student profile will be updated accordingly, and you will be able to store the extra information.

These new fields will be automatically included in the excel spreasheets from the advanced search and the reports, so that you can use them for extra filtering and analysis.

On top of this, the advanced search has been improved to take the new fields into account as well:

We hope you find this new feature useful and, should you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

Create Exams For a Whole Class

2012-04-26T00:00:00+01:00

Today we’re releasing a small feature that will speed up the creation of Exams for a whole class.

In NiftySchool you can schedule exams, add students to the exam sheet, and keep track of their results.

This is useful to schools that provide exams to their students or offer examinations as an extra service (test centers for example).

If you need to test a whole class though, the process of adding each student to the exam sheet could be quite tedious as all of their identifiers need to be entered one by one.

This is both inefficent and error-prone.

From now on, to quickly add an exam for a class, just go to the class register and click on the ‘Add Exam’ link at the bottom of the page:

Now enter the exam name and other details, as you would normally do for a new exam:

The system will automatically pull all students enrolled in that class as of today and add them to the exam sheet.

We hope you find this new feature useful to speed up your exams setup!

Should you have any questions feel free to get in touch at info@niftyschool.com

How To Clone Classes

2012-04-24T00:00:00+01:00

Sometimes it’s useful to quickly duplicate a class you have in NiftySchool.

Good examples are schools that open the same classes every semester and don’t want to manually re-enroll students from the previous semester.

Creating new classes from scratch can be a tedious process, especially if you need to add the same students one by one.

Today we’re adding a new feature to clone existing classes, along with their data and students.

In order to duplicate a class, go to its ‘Edit details’ page:

Now click on the ‘Duplicate class’ button on the right hand side of the screen:

Choose the name of the new class (this will be the new copy) and amend the dates if necessary. Make sure to input an end date, this will be used for the new enrollments.

Once you complete this steps and click on ‘Duplicate’, you should see a screen similar to the following:

A new class has been created, using the data from the original one, which has not been altered.

Also, as you can see from the screen above, a new enrollment has been added for each one of the students enrolled in the copied class.

Now that you have the new class, you’re free to edit its details and update schedule, times, teacher, levels and notes as required.

We hope you find this new feature useful to speed up your class setup!

Should you have any questions feel free to get in touch at info@niftyschool.com

New Monthly Registers

2012-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool lets you print your class registers in various formats: daily, weekly, landscape, portrait, with/without signatures and so on.

Many schools, though, teach classes once a week, so printing a class register per week can be both a tedious task and a waste of paper.

As of today we’re introducing new monthly registers for group classes.

From your class register screen, just click on the tiny ‘month’ link:

You will now have a full view of the month for the selected group and you will be able to edit attendances by clicking on the coloured boxes as you would in the daily or weekly registers.

By clicking on the ‘Print monthly register’ on the right hand side, you will be able to print the new, more compact, version of the register:

This has one column for each day of the month, so you don’t need to print it every week (unless the enrollments change).

Note that all of the days in which students are not supposed to attend are grayed out, so that you know when people are supposed to be in the class.

We hope you find this new addition useful, and don’t hesitate to send your comments and suggestions to info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

Secure Your NiftySchool Account With an Extra SSL Certificate

2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

At NiftySchool we take your data security very seriously. Our service relies on redundant servers, crypted data and constantly updated backups.

From today we are also offering the option to secure your account with an additional SSL certificate.

What does this mean?

SSL is a cryptographic protocol that provides communication security over the Internet.

Once the certificate is installed, anything between your computer/phone and the NiftySchool servers will be encrypted, and no one will be able to intercept your data along the way.

Your account will be served over https instead of plain http.

How much does it cost?

In order to secure your account, we will issue a certificate for your subdomain and install it in our servers. The whole process can usually be completed by our team within one working day.

Certificates need to be renewed every year.
You will be billed £39/year on top of your standard subscription fee.

Should you be interested in this add-on, go to your NiftySchool account section and click on “Add SSL Certificate to your account”:

This will take you to paypal where the yearly subscription will be set up, similarly to what happens when your first sign up for NiftySchool.

How do I check if my certificate is enabled?

As soon as you certificate is enabled, you’ll see two changes:

The URL of your account will automatically switch to https://yoursubsomain.niftyschool.com

A seal icon will appear in your login page:

You will see a lock symbol in your browser indicating that your account is secured:

What if I don’t want it?

No problem, your account will keep working normally on standard http connection, but you won’t take advantage of the advanced security provided by the SSL certificate.

We hope you enjoy the added security. For any questions feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com

Improvements To Assessment Tests

2012-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool allows you to track assessment tests, and keep track of results and student progress over time.

Today we’re releasing a minor update, to allow you to store more information about your assessment tests.

Here is how the assessment tests section looks like now:

It differs from the previous version mainly because:

You can store the test’s name, for example you can record “First assesment” or “Final assessment”.
You can store the overall score, and separate scores for writing, listening, speaking and so on.
You can keep detailed notes about the test, such as particular difficulties the student experienced or area of improvement

You can find the new assessment test section in the student’s file under the “Test” tab.

We hope you find this update useful, and feel free to give us feedback on how we’re doing by sending an email to info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

New Customisable User Permissions

2012-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool allows different members of staff to log in and complete tasks related to their specific duties.

For example, teachers can only see their own timetable and classes, while receptionists can see student details, take payments, and manage enrollments.

In order to decide which actions could be performed, and which ones couldn’t, NiftySchool used to rely primarily on the user role, such as ‘teacher’, ‘receptionist’, ‘manager’, etc.

This was a simple way to manage permissions that worked most of the time, but limited you when setting up users with mixed responsibilities.

Today we’re releasing a new permission engine that will allow you to decide exactly what each one of your users can or cannot do in the system.

Under the user’s details, you will now find a “manually edit permissions” link:

Click on the link, and a new section will appear, with a set of actions that you can check/uncheck, based on what you want the user to be able to do:

Click ‘Save and Confirm’, and the specific permissions set for the user will override the defaults inferred by their roles.

For example, a receptionist can by default access the reports section, but you can restrict this behaviour by unticking the “Can access reports” checkbox, by the “Reports” label.

If you want to reset the permissions to the default values for a role, just unselect them all, and select the checkbox by the role you want to assign (eg: click ‘remove all’ and then re-tick ‘teacher’).

In the next few weeks we will tweak the list of actions available to accommodate customer requests and to fine tune the default behaviour of the available roles.

Should you need specific actions in the system to be configurable, please let us know sending and email to info@niftyschool.com.

Quickly Record Multiple Installments

2012-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Customise Your Billing Information

2012-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Migration To a New Data Center

2012-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

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!

How To Track Outstanding Payments

2011-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

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!

Support For Generic Documents

2011-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

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!

New Website And Video Tutorials

2011-10-25T00:00:00+01:00

Today we’re happy to announce a renewed website for NiftySchool!

There are a number of things you may be interested in:

1. Feature Tour

The new feature tour explains what NiftySchool can offer and gives you a better understanding of what the software is all about.
See the new pages here and full list of features here.

2. Video Tutorials

We’ve recorded a number of video tutorials that can help you getting started with the system.
Check them out in the new videos section or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

3. Login directly from the website

We’ve added a Login link in homepage, so that you can log in even if you don’t remember your custom subdomain:

Don’t worry, your account is still stored in its private area of the system, and still retains its subdomain. We just wanted to make it easier for users to log in when they don’t remember exaclty their subdomain.

Hope you enjoy the update!

Never Forget Student Birthdays

2011-09-30T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool provides an alerts system, that automatically notifies you when an important condition needs checking.

Alerts are created, for example, when a student attendance is poor, or when a payment is due.

Many schools prepare birthday cards for their students and celebrate birthdays during the lessons, so we added a new alert that checks for student’s birthdays, and reminds you about them.

Even students who don’t like to celebrate their birthdays will appreciate the extra care you’ve taken by buying them a card, or by just wishing them happy birthday!

When registering a student in the student, fill in his date of birth:

Based on this field, every morning, NiftySchool will check if there’s a birthday coming up, and will let you know by putting an alert in your dashboard.

Birthdays are shown one day in advance, so you have the time to buy cards or organize drinks for the day.

Should you let the birthday pass, the alerts will just disappear, without cluttering your busy list of things to do.

Also, should you find these alerts annoying, remember they can be switched off from the Configuration screen.

We hope you enjoy this tiny new feature!

How To Track Late Attendances

2011-09-24T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool allows you to track student attendance and precisely compute student attendance rates.

To make these percentages even more accurate, you may want to track when students are late and do not attend the full lesson.

In order to mark a student as late, just go to the class register page, and click on one of the attendance boxes:

Click on the attendance box and the following dialogue box will pop up:

You can change the attendance record to present, late (specifying the amount of minutes) or absent.

Once you click ‘Confirm & Save’ the register will be updated, and the page refreshed:

Every late attendance will be marked in orange in the register.

Lateness will also show up in the student’s attendance calendar, so that you can quickly spot when there’s a recurring problem you need to tackle:

The total amount of lateness will be taken into account in the attendance percentage.

In the screenshot above the student lost 1h 10m: see the difference between attended hours and expected hours at the bottom of the calendar.

This features allows you to precisely track attendance, tardiness and students’ attendance percentages.

If, for example, a student is always five minutes late for his 50 minutes classes, his attendance rate will be 90% instead of 100% even if he never missed a lesson.

We hope you enjoy this feature, and should you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop us an email at info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

What Can Teachers See?

2011-09-20T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool allows you to set up logins for your teachers.

This is a very useful feature because teachers can help you track attendance and reduce the amount of administration you need to do.

By giving them access to NiftySchool, you can ask them to update attendance on a daily basis, which they can do both from the office and from home, keeping your database consistent and always up to date.

Also, you may want to make sure that they cannot retrieve students’ phone numbers and email addresses to contact them directly.

Let’s review how to set up teacher access and what teachers can or cannot do in the system.

Set up teacher access:

In order to set up teacher access, go to the Staff tab and create a new teacher.

Specify email and password (twice for verification purposes) and make sure to only select the ‘teacher’ role in the Permissions section, otherwise the teacher will be able to perform more operations that you’d like him to.

You can also flag the ‘send notification email’ checkbox. This will automatically send an email to the teacher, with instructions to log in.

If a record for the teacher is already present though, the system will NOT send the instructions email.

If this is the case, just set the password to a temporary value and tell the teacher what that is, he will be able to amend it once logged in.

NiftySchool does not send password information to existing teachers because all passwords are encrypted upon creation and cannot be retrieved in clear for security reasons.

Teacher login:

Once a teacher is recorded into the system, he will be able to log into the system using the standard login form:

Teachers will not see private information about the students or classes assigned to their colleagues.

Their accounts are restricted so that they can only perform certain actions in the system and see a limited amount of data.

Specifically, they will only be able to:

See their timetable
See their classes
See their class registers
Track attendance
See staff list
See scheduled exams

Note: Teachers will not see student details!

This allows you to grant them access without worrying about them stealing your students’ emails or phone numbers or changing details in the system.

We believe is vital for schools to keep their data private and prevent information sharing when not necessary.

We hope you’ll find this useful, should you have any questions or comments feel free to get in touch at info@niftyschool.com.

Accommodation Handling: The Basics

2011-09-15T00:00:00+01:00

Many language schools manage accommodation for their students.

Either directly or via an agency, they need to keep track of available hosts, room/beds details and periods of stay.

The following video walks you through the basics of the accommodation module in NiftySchool.

It’s about six minutes long and you can find a transcript at the bottom, enjoy!

Should you have any questions or suggestions about this module, feel free to drop us an email at info@niftyschool.com.

Transcript with images:

Hi, this is Paolo from NiftySchool.com


NiftySchool is an online software to manage language schools.
In this video I will explain how to manage accommodation for your students.
First of all, make sure the accommodation module is enabled by going to the General settings section under the Configuration tab.
Just click on this check box and save to enable accommodation handling. This makes sure you can see the Accommodation tab at the top.

Schools who don’t handle accommodation for their students may want to hide that and keep the screen uncluttered.
When you go to the accommodation section, you will see the list of your hosts, along with basic information, such as the number of available beds and contact details.

You can search for a specific host by typing the name on the search box on the right hand side, for example ‘Farrel’ and you will see the matching host highlighted, or you can jump to a specific category, such as Apartments, Families or Hostels.
You can see a bit more information about your hosts by clicking on the ‘expand button’ next to the host name, to have a quick look at their details.

Otherwise, by clicking on the host name link, you will be taken to the full host details page.
For example this host offers three beds: one is currently taken by one student, and another one is booked because the student will start his stay from next week.

On this page you have all you need to get a full picture of this host.
You have the name, description and address at the top.
If you click on the ‘map’ link the address will be opened in Google Maps, so that you can see where it actually is.
On the right hand side you have the contact details: phone numbers and email address.
If the host is managed by an agency you will have the agency’s details as well, so that you can phone up or send an email quickly when needed.

Scrolling down you have the list of beds, and the specific details of what this host can or cannot offer.
For example this host has no children, has a dog, has an internet connection available, does not allow smokers, allows the use of the washing machine and can cook dinners as part of the stay.
All of these options, and details about each specific bed, such as shared rooms or private bathrooms, can be amended from the ‘Edit host’ page, clicking on this button.
At the bottom of the page you have the list of students who have stayed with this host over time.

The list is split in three sections, so that you can clearly see who’s staying now, who booked a bed, and who has been here in the past.
It stores pretty much the full accommodation history for this family.
Now let’s pretend we want to find some suitable accommodation for one of our students.
To do that, I’ll go back to the host list and click on the ‘Find accommodation’ button.

You can specify a number of different criteria here.
For example our student is looking for a family who accept smokers, have an internet connection and offer a private bathroom.
Click ‘search’ and the list of matching results will appear at the bottom.
You can then refine your search by area or specify when the student will need the room from.
A room which appears as taken today might be available in a few weeks time, so, make sure to always input the correct check-in date, and the system will give you the correct results.
Once you’re happy with the bed you’ve found, you can click on the ‘take’ button and record a stay for the student.

In this form, you need to type the student name or identifier, and the check-in and check-out dates.
For example I’ll book this room for two weeks, and click save.
Now the booked period shows up at the bottom of the page and this bed will not be bookable by anyone else in the same period.
This information is not only visible from the host page, but also from the student’s profile page.
If I search for this student, you’ll see that there is an accommodation tab in his file.
This will list the accommodation periods recorded in NiftySchool and will let you amend the dates should you need to.

So, to recap: the accommodation module allows you to record your hosts, beds, peculiarities of each family and track which students are staying where, and when.

Thanks for watching!

We Are Removing The 'Misc' Tab

2011-09-14T00:00:00+01:00

As described in this post, we’re adding a new Accommodation module to NiftySchool.

In order to do that, we needed to clean up the interface, and make room for a new ‘Accommodation’ tab under the student profile.

We decided to remove the ‘Misc’ tab, because many of its fields weren’t widely used, and we could make better use of that space.

Important fields such as “Interest” and “How the student heard about the school” are being moved under the ‘Details’ tab to make them more prominent, others will be removed alltogether.

Let’s see exaclty what will happen to each one of those fields:

Interested in: this field is important and will be moved under the ‘Details’ tab.

How long has studied before/how long has been in the country/how long will remain: these fields will be removed but their values will be copied into the student’s notes, under ‘Details’.

How the student heard about the school: this field is important and will be moved under “Details” and renamed to “Contact Media”.

Trial lessons: this will be moved under ‘Details’.

Level reached when leaving: this field will be removed because the progress level can be tracked as assessment test under the ‘Exams’ tab. Existing values will be copied into the notes under ‘Details’.

Total hours attended: This will be removed as the total amount of hours can be seen, automatically computed, from the Attendance tab. Existing values will be copied into the notes.

Last attended day: As per the total attended hours this field will be removed as it’s computed value can be seen from the Attendance tab.

At the bottom of the ‘Details’ tab, you will find Contact Media, Interests, and Trial lessons details:

When creating a new student, you will be asked to fill in Contact Media and Interest, so that you’re less likely to forget them:

Old values will also be copied to the notes to make sure no infomation is lost in the process:

We believe these changes will make the software both clearer and more consistent, while making room for the new functionalities.

Should you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com

How To Track Discounts On Student Payments

2011-09-13T00:00:00+01:00

Many language schools offer discounts on their lesson fees as a promotional and student retention tool.

They might be in form of vouchers, discounts for long enrollments or outstanding credits from previous courses.

Tracking discounts correctly is important to have clear visibility of your cash flow and get correct figures from your daily cashiers.

In order to track discounts in NiftySchool, we suggest the following method:

1) Create one payment type for each discount method

For example you could create three new entries in your payment types setup panel: Vouchers, Credit, and Discount.

When setting up these new payment types, make sure to tick the ‘This only accepts negative values’ checkbox.

This will be your safeguard when taking payments, as it will check the amount and prevent mistakes such as tracking positive discounts.

A discount will always have a negative amount (eg: -£50).

2) When taking a payment, add one row for the full amount and another one for the discount

Imagine you’re taking a payment worth £2000, and the student is entitled to a discount of £100.

You would enter two payment items: one worth £2000 (Cash) and the other worth -£100 (Cash) for the discount:

It’s important to mark the discount with the same payment method as the fees (Cash in the example), so that the daily cashier can be reconciled correctly:

Having marked the discount types as ‘Only negative’, the system prevents you from making mistakes:

This simple procedure allows you to have correct breakdowns of your payments and will give your accountant a precise picture of your transactions when downloading the payments in Excel format.

How To Manage Complex Schedules & Class Timetables

2011-09-01T00:00:00+01:00

During a recent data import for one of our customers, we noticed how laborious it can get to manage a complex weekly timetable.

NiftySchool is straightforward, for example, if you have always the same teacher teaching a course, with the occasional substitution.

You can quickly set that up as a ‘default teacher’ for the course, and every lesson in the timetable will have that teacher assigned by default.

You can assign a default teacher for each course you create.

What if you do have a regular schedule, but not a default teacher?

For example a class taught twice a week, on Mondays by teacher Scott and on Thursdays by teacher Angelica?

The Problem:

There is no way in NiftySchool to set up multiple default teachers for the class, based on the day of the week in which the lesson is taking place.

Luckily, you can customize the teacher assigned to each individual lesson in the timetable, but we cannot ‘infer’ more than one default teacher.

From the timetable, click on a lesson and change the teacher assigned.

This is flexible enough for most scenarios, but it raises another issue.

If the group class, taught by Scott on Mondays and Angelica on Thursdays, lasts for a few months, you will be forced to manually assign all of the appropriate lessons week by week:

1) Click on the Monday’s lesson, select Scott
2) Click on the Thursday’s lesson, select Angelica

This is repetitive work that we would like to avoid.

The Solution:

There is a quick way to copy the teachers assigned to lessons from the previous week’s timetable to the same lessons on the current week.

This means that once you configured this week’s timetable correctly, you can ‘replicate’ the same configuration with a single click.

In order to do this, you need to browse to the timetable and click on the “assign teachers as per last week” link.

For each lesson in the current timetable, the system will look up the same lesson in the previous week and copy its teacher configuration over.

Once this is done, the system will report how many lessons have been updated and will highlight them for you to review.

We hope this speeds up your weekly timetabling, and makes it a bit less tedious! Enjoy!!!

A Printout Of Your Daily Room Allocation For Your Students And Teachers To See

2011-08-31T00:00:00+01:00

This morning we released a small feature that a few customers have been requesting for a long while.

NiftySchool provides a clear representation of how the rooms in your school are used during the day: we call it the ‘Room Planner’.

The room planner is useful to spot double bookings in your rooms or to quickly tell students and teachers where they are supposed to go for a lesson.

The problem is, you cannot stick your monitor to the wall, and most browsers cannot decently print such a complex page.

So we decided to add a printing functionality to it.

You can now print the room planner in PDF format and stick it to the reception door or message board!

Click on the printer icon on the right hand side of the ‘Room planner’ screen to download and print the PDF.

This is how the printed version looks like:

Click on the image to see the PDF version. The printed version automatically includes your school’s name and logo.

By printing this every day, and putting it in a visible spot, you will minimize the amount of questions that your students and teachers will ask at the reception.

We hope you find this update useful.

Should you have comments or suggestion to improve this feature, feel free to drop us a note at info@niftyschool.com. Enjoy!

Easily Print Teacher's Monthly Lessons

2011-08-30T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool provides a timetable module that lets you see how your lessons are organised during the week.

The timetable can be filtered by teacher so that you can check and manage lessons for individual teachers.

This is great for a day to day management, but a few of our customers requested a more comprehensive view of the lessons taught by a teacher.

It would be useful to list all of the lessons on a given month, instead of scanning the timetable week by week.

We are introducing a new small feature that lets you just do that: print a montly list of lessons per teacher.

From the teachers’ monthly summary screen you can now print the list of lessons, using the print button on the right hand side.

The list of lessons includes date, start/end time, duration, and optionally the topic covered during the lesson.

Click on the image to see a larger PDF version.

This list is useful if you want to check the lessons taught by a teacher for the payroll or as a monthly schedule if you assign classes in advance.

Do you find this feature useful?
Send your comments to info@niftyschool.com!

How To Customize Payment Receipts And Invoices

2011-08-26T00:00:00+01:00

In the past couple of weeks we acquired new customers that send invoices to their students before a payment takes place.

To handle both Recipts and Invoices, we updated the ‘Print receipt’ functionality which is now more flexible and customizable.

Let’s take a look at a printed invoice, and see which sections are now configurable:

Click to see sample PDF version.

The new customizable sections are:

Sub-header: optional, configurable under the Configuration/Receipts tab, can be used to add extra information about your school, such as contact details, slogans etc.

Notes: these are taken from the payment notes, and can be used to specify payment’s due date, card used to take payment etc.

Extra Notes: optional, configurable under the Configuration/Receipts tab, can be used to add extra notes that do not change between payments. This is a good place to specify payment instructions and your bank account details.

All of these fields can be changed under the Configuration tab:

These new sections support HTML tags so that you can style them as you wish, with bold/centered/underlined text or different font sizes.

We will switch to a “What You See Is What You Get” editor soon to make it easier to style your text.

Also, you can now switch from “Receipt” to “Invoice” so that the printed copies can reflect the type of document you’re printing.

Should you have any questions or suggestions about this new feature, feel free to get in touch sending an email to info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

Updates To Payments Handling

2011-07-24T00:00:00+01:00

In the past few weeks we’ve been working on the payments section, to simplify it and make it more consistent.

The core changes we’ve made are the following:

Multiple items for the same payment
Easier receipt printing
Support for thermal printers

Let’s see these changes in detail:

1) Multi-item payments

When taking a payment now you can specify multiple payment ‘items’ in a single go.

This allows you to easily link a payment to, for example, registration/lesson fees/accommodation/books in a single logical unit.

This is more in line with how payment and receipts work in the real world: students make a single payment for multiple things.

The payment has now a ‘header’ section (which includes date, payment method, receipt number etc), and one or more item rows (in which you specify type of payment, description, amount).

Total amount will be automatically computed talling up all of the items’ amounts.

2) Easier receipt printing

The new payment structure allows you to print receipts straight away, without manually grouping payments as you did before.

Click on the ‘Print receipt’ button on the right hand side to print a receipt, using the new PDF layout (it used to generate an excel spreadsheet).

Click to see the PDF version.

The receipt automatically includes your logo, school name and student contact information if provided.

3) Support for thermal printers

Some schools may want to use special thermal printers for the receipts.

Receipts printed on thermal paper look like the ones you get at the supermarket, they are long and narrow and are usually less expensive if you print a lot.

You can enable thermal printer layout, going to the receipts configuration page and selecting the ‘Use thermal printer/paper layout’ option.

All the receipts will be printed with the special layout instead of using the standard full page one.

We hope you find the new payments more intuitive, and the new receipts feature useful.

Should you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.

Enjoy!

How to Generate Student Reports

2011-07-14T00:00:00+01:00

Most language schools produce documents of some sort for their students/clients, outlining classes taken and general progress.

They may be called ‘progress reports’ or ‘student reports’ and usually are snapshots of the student’s file, which includes lessons count, absences, level reached, etc.

We’ve been working on automating these reports and we just released an initial version which includes:

Classes, number of lessons, absences
Attendance rate summaries
Assesment tests & exams
Payments
Notes & special events

Here is a sample generated report – click on it to see the PDF version:

Data is pulled from the system, so you get this for free just by tracking enrollments and attendance correctly.

For many schools this is a huge time saver as it reduces repetitive work and mistakes.

How do I generate this report?

Just open a student’s file and click on the ‘Generate student report’ link on the right hand side:

When you generate the report, you can choose which sections you want to include.

Deselect the sections you don’t want to appear in the report or choose between the available presets:

basic – only generates attendance report
payments – only classes & payments
everything

The report prints nicely in PDF and includes your school’s logo and contact details, so that you can hand it over to your students without any modifications.

We hope you find this useful, and let us know if you think your school needs more of this!

Automatically Close Classes

2011-07-12T00:00:00+01:00

For a long time NiftySchool had the concept of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ classes.

We had an internal flag that marked classes as ‘closed’ (meaning they were no longer taught), and you could close and reopen them at will.

Over time we discovered this was quite counterintuitive and generated conflicts with the class dates.

For example, how should the system treat a class which ends next month, but has been marked as closed? If it is no longer being taught, shouldn’t its end date be updated accordingly?

We just released an update so that you no longer need to manually close classes. They will be automatically considered open or closed based on their end date.

This means all past classes are automatically considered closed.

To close a class you now just need to set its end date in the past.

This is how the system behaves now:

End date not set: class is open
End date in the future: class is open
End date past: class is closed

You can still see your past classes clicking on the ‘in the past’ link on the top right corner of you class list:

This change brings a number of benefits:

less ambiguity on the class status
you no longer need to close classes manually
old classes are moved to the ‘past’ section automatically
classes are reopened automatically if you extend the end date

We believe this reduces the amount of maintenance you need to do on your data, and helps keeping the system more consistent.

It is especially useful if you have a high number of private demo classes, as you don’t need to close each one of them individually.

Only one last note: if you had old closed classes without an end date set, they may now pop up into your active class list.
Just set their end date in the past (e.g.: last week) to move them back to the archive.

Not to worry, all data about closed classes will be preserved and you can still go ‘back in time’ with the timetable and see all of your stored information, such as attendance, hours taught per teacher etc.

How To Handle Flexible Private Lessons

2011-07-07T00:00:00+01:00

In the past few weeks we started updating NiftySchool to better support one-to-one classes.

In particular we’re making changes so that you can manage private lessons that do not follow a fixed schedule.

Introducing private classes without fixed schedule:

When creating a new private class you will be now able to choose between creating a fixed schedule (eg: every Monday and Wednesday) or no schedule at all:

Let’s see what these two scheduling options do:

1) “Add lessons for each of the following days of the week”:

This option will set up one lesson for each day of the week between start and end date.

If you select, for example, ‘Monday’ between the 1st of August and 1st of September, you will end up with five lessons predefined in your timetable.

This works like recurring events in Outlook or Google calendar, it is a quick way to set up multiple lessons at once.

2) “I will add lessons manually later”:

This means that your class has no fixed schedule. The system will not preset any lessons in the timetable, and you will need to add them one by one from the register.

This is useful if you have casual students that book lessons whenever they can, but are not attending regularly.

For such students you can create an empty class, e.g.: "Paolo’s private lessons’, and add lessons as they happen.

Remember that all lessons can be canceled and rescheduled individually later – even if created by a fixed weekly schedule.

If you have a class which is taught ‘almost’ every Monday, for example, you’re still better off creating a weekly schedule and canceling the Mondays in which the lesson doesn’t take place.

New private class register:

Daily or weekly registers do not make sense for one-to-one classes as they have on average one or two lessons per week.

We changed the private class register to show all of the lessons taken by the student:

With this is easy to see how many lessons have been done, when they took place, and what topic was covered, all in a single screen.

This register can be printed and used to make the student sign their presence:

Your school’s logo will automatically appear at the top, and your contact details at the bottom of each page, so that this can also be used as attendance and progress report for your student, or your business client.

Topics covered and hours attended can be entered from the ‘Edit attendaces’ page to keep the register up to date, and printed again.

How do I add ‘unscheduled’ lessons?

Click on the new ‘Add lesson’ button on the right hand side of your register and you will be presented with this popup window:

Pick date/time/duration and save to update your register.

You can then add as many lessons as you want without any schedule restriction.

Similarly, you can click on the date of a lesson in the register to cancel it/reschedule it/assign new teacher etc.

These features should allow you to keep private lessons more organized and under control.

I hope you enjoy the new changes!

How To Cancel A Lesson

2011-06-28T00:00:00+01:00

Following the recent release of the new timetable, we’re adding a tiny but useful feature: ability to cancel arbitrary lessons without changing the default class schedule.

From the room planner or weekly timetable, click on a lesson to see its details, then tick ‘this lesson is not taking place’ to cancel it:

The lesson will still show up in your timetable, but it will be in red and flagged with the ‘×’ symbol.

This makes sure your staff is aware of this unexpected change.

You can reset the lesson at later stage by just un-ticking the ‘canceled’ check box from the details form.

Please note that cancelling a lesson also affects:

teachers monthly summary: cancelled lessons are not counted.
student attendance: cancelled lessons are not taken into account.
room planner: cancelled lessons are not shown (because the room is free).

As a next step we will be adding the ability to schedule spare lessons (not strictly linked to the weekly class schedule) to allow greater flexibility especially for private lessons.

Thank you for your continued support and enjoy the new feature!

New Weekly Timetable

2011-06-26T00:00:00+01:00

Hello everyone, today we’re happy to announce a new timetable module that will make it easy to see how your week looks, and will allow you to quickly reschedule and change individual lessons in your calendar.

I’ll list its major features below to give you a glimpse of how this can be used for your school.

1. The timetable itself

First of all we wanted to provide a clear picture of all of the lessons taking place in a given week.

Go to the new ‘Timetable’ menu under ‘Classes’ and you will be presented with a new calendar screen that summarizes your scheduled lessons:

The timetable is separated by day and then further split into morning, afternoon and evening.

For each day, the lessons are then listed by start time, with the earliest first.

We have chosen this representation because, if you have many classes taking place at the same time, a standard calendar would end up being too crowded and unreadable, while this remains nice and tidy as the number of lessons grows.

Click on a lesson name and a popup will allow you to see and change its details:

You can change the teacher assigned to the lesson, the start time, duration or even reschedule it to another day – or go to the register to see the list of students who are supposed to attend.

If you change the lesson duration or its date, it will be highlighted by a diamond symbol in the timetable, as displayed in the image below. This will allow you to quickly spot where changes have been made.

It is like changing a single event in a ‘recurring event’ series in Outlook or Google calendar.

If you have a class with an irregular schedule you no longer need to create complex combinations of fixed-schedule classes, as you can shuffle lessons around as you desire.

2. Printed timetable

The printed timetable has been updated to reflect the on-screen version, so now is grouped by start time and no longer by class.

It includes more information than the on-screen version (teacher, room, number of students etc) and also features a different color per teacher, which is handy when teachers want to look up where they need to be next during the day.

3. Individual Teacher Schedule

The time table can get quite crowded if there are a lot of lessons, so you can filter by teacher to avoid this.

Click on the ‘everyone’ link and select an individual teacher from the dropdown list to view on that teachers lessons:

Click on the teacher name to filter:

This filtered view is also what your teachers will see if you grant them access to the system. They can log in and will only see their own schedule and classes, keeping other teachers’ data private.

Also note that at the bottom of the timetable there is a summary of the hours taught by the teacher per day, so that you can make sure the numbers tally up correctly.

4. Make sure every lesson has a teacher assigned

Some schools run classes in which there is no default teacher assigned. They rotate teachers so that the students can get used to different accents and expressions (eg: classes taught using the callan method).

In these scenarios, it’s easy to forget to assign teachers to the lessons, and not take advantage of the NiftySchool monthly reports.

We added a feature specifically to spot these lessons and fix them:

By clicking on the ‘unassigned’ link you can filter out all of the lessons that already have a teacher so that you can take care of the ones which don’t.

Once you assign a teacher to these ‘unassigned’ lessons, they will disappear from the screen and the ‘unassigned’ counter will go back to zero.

5. Other minor changes

Now that the teachers assigned to your lessons can be set from the timetable, the ‘Teachers’ tab has been changed to list your teachers and their average number of hour taught per week.

Another improvement is that the teachers monthly report has been improved to link to the teachers schedules.

We are excited about the improvements and we hope you enjoy these new features.

Feel free to get in touch at info@niftyschool.com should you have any questions or ideas about the timetable & have fun managing your lessons!

How To Categorize Your Classes

2011-06-09T00:00:00+01:00

Today I’m going to show you how to keep your classes organized in NiftySchool.

If you have a large number of classes (and that’s often the case if you provide private lessons), the class list screen can become cluttered quite quickly.

You can now assign your classes to specific groups that will be separated in the interface, based on how you would logically categorize your classes.

For example you could categorize by language taught (eg: English, Italian, Spanish, French), by schedule (eg: Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Saturday), or by arbitrary theme (eg: TOEFL training, General courses, one to ones, etc..).

In order to assign a class to a category, go the class details page and fill in the ‘Category’ field:

This will automatically create a new category, or reuse an existing one if you already used that name.

When you start typing the category name, a dropdown will appear displaying existing categories with a matching name, so you can just click on one of them to avoid unnecessary typing:

The category name is case sensitive, so be careful when typing because, for example, “Morning” and “MORNING” would be saved as two different categories.

Once the category setting is saved, the class list screen will be updated to display your classes organized by category:

Also quick links on the right hand side will allow you to quickly browse between different categories, useful if the list of classes does not fit in a single screen and you need to jump to the right section:

You can freely choose the category names that match your own requirements. Also, empty categories will automatically disappear to keep the system tidy.

This should help you keep your database in order and your increasing number of classes under control.

Happy spring cleaning!

Database Upgrade: What Has Changed

2011-06-08T00:00:00+01:00

This morning we released the first upgrade to the NiftySchool database, as specified in NiftySchool: Transition To More Flexible Scheduling.

Let’s take a look at what the ‘surface’ changes are:

1) Callan lessons have been split in two

We used to treat Callan lesson as a single two-hour unit, with two different teachers assigned.

We have now changed this to two individual lessons. This makes it easier to compute the teacher schedule and, very soon, to cancel or reschedule lessons indipendently.

In the student attendance, class registers and room planner screens you’ll now see Callan lessons represented individually.

2) Teachers are automatically assigned to lessons

By settings a default teacher for a class, their schedule will now be automatically updated for all of the future lessons (including today’s).

Previously you had to manually specify teachers’ schedules on a weekly basis, which was tedious and error prone.

Now you only specify changes from the standard schedule.

Also, the teachers monthly summary is now more useful as it shows the total number of hours assigned for future lessons as well.

3) Missing lessons alert

The ‘Missing lessons’ alert has been updated to correctly check for three missing attendances in a row.

This is now computed on a ‘per-class’ basis, so you will get one alert per-class/per-student (eg: if a student is enrolled in two classes and doesn’t show up for three days, you will get two separate alerts).

This is important as the student could have different schedules on different classes and a generic computation of ‘missing for three days’ may have led to incorrect alarms.

4) Updated attendance codes and colors

In the class register screens you will now notice a few slight changes in style.
Attendances will be marked as:

Gray if the student is not supposed to attend on a given day/lesson
Red if absent
Red with ‘A’ if the absence is authorized
Red with ‘H’ if the absence is authorized because of a public holiday

The new compact markers make the weekly view less crammed and visually more clear.

5) Re-introduced lesson date-picker

We re-introduced the lesson date picker.

Now you can quickly browse to a given date’s register. If in weekly mode, you will be taken to the relevant week.

Other changes are on their way, and we expect to roll out a number of other minor tweaks and updates in the next few days. Should you notice any error, please contact us at info@niftyschool.com or on skype (niftyschool).

NiftySchool: Transition To More Flexible Scheduling

2011-06-03T00:00:00+01:00

In the past few weeks we’ve been working hard on a internal infrastructure upgrade. This post explains what we have been doing and why.

NiftySchool it’s always been a schedule-based system, in which you specify the weekly schedule for your classes and enrollments.

When setting up a class, you can tell the system that lessons will be taught for example “every Monday, Tuesday and Friday between 10:00 and 11:30”.

This is good for schools that have fairly regular schedules but it is not working well if you have frequent variations or if you need fine-grained lesson management. In order to create extra lessons, for example, you currently need to create ad-hoc 1-day classes, or write custom information in the class notes.

We appreciate that schools need to be able to quickly add, remove or reschedule individual lessons independently of the standard class schedule, overriding the ‘default’ calendar set for the class. The class schedule should only be a quick way to set up regular lessons but should not be a limit to the flexibility of the class calendar.

We are changing the system to be more ‘lesson-centric’. Class schedules will be treated like ‘recurring events’ in outlook, with each lesson individually customisable (date, time, teacher, room etc).

In order to achieve that, we have refactored the way we store data internally and we updated the application to use the new structure. This is one of the biggest changes we’ve done to the system since we launched.

So what’s the plan?

We will be rolling out the changes in stages:

1) We will upgrade the underlying structure keeping the functionality as it is. You should see no noticeable difference in the platform. Your lesson data will be automatically updated during the migration.

2) There will be a cool-down period of about a week, in which we will monitor the system with the new architecture. This may lead to a few tweaks to improve performance of pages or slightly adjust functionalities.

3) We will start adding new features that take advantage of the new architecture, and you will start enjoying the greater flexibility that the new system provides.

Examples of features we’re going to add are:

ability to add ‘unscheduled’ lessons
rescheduling or cancelling individual lessons
calendar synchronisation with outlook and google calendar

Please note that the system will be constantly available and you can keep using it as usual.

Stage #1 will be rolled out in the next few days, please bear with us during this transitory period. We’re excited as this will allow us to support your requests better going forward and really take NiftySchool to the next level.

Should you have any questions about the upgrade, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com. Thank you for your patience and continued support.

How To Print Receipts For Your Payments

2011-05-21T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool allows you to print receipts for the payments you take. Let’s take a look at the features available and configuration parameters involved.

1. Setup receipt number

Before printing your first receipt, you need to set up your first receipt number and optional prefix.

If your next receipt number is "AAA/124", you need to set “Next Receipt Number” to "124" and prefix to "AAA/". Note that the forward slash character is included in the prefix string.

You can access this configuration page from the Configuration tab, under the Receipts box.

This set up does not need to be repeated for each receipt, as the receipt number will be automatically incremented as you issue them.

You may want to come back to this page once per financial year, though, to reset the receipt number or change the prefix.

In certain countries, for example, the prefix is always bound to the current year, so that receipt numbers follow this convention: "2011/23", "2011/24", etc.

If you do not need a prefix, feel free to leave the field blank.

2. Setup VAT/Tax per payment category

The next step is to set up the correct VAT/Tax percentages for your payment categories.

Tax percentages vary by country and by payment type. By configuring these value you automate VAT/Tax calculation in your receipts.

For example, in the UK, lesson fees are subject to 20% VAT, but Books and other material can be tax-exempt or subject to reduced rate.

For each payment category, amend the tax percentage to suit your needs. If a category should have multiple tax percentages, we suggest to split it into different payment categories.

You access this customisation screen from the Configuration tab under Payment Categories.

3. Create your receipts

Receipts in NiftySchool can span multiple payments. That means that a ‘payment’ record in the system correspond to one ‘line’ in your receipt, and you can issue a receipt for multiple items in one go.

From the payments screen, click on the Create receipt button on the right hand side, and select the payments that you want to include in your receipt.

You will be presented with a list of payments that do not have a receipt yet. Select the payments you want to include and click ‘Confirm and save’.

The receipt can now be printed, click on the Print receipt button on the right hand side to dowload it in excel format and print it:

The payment amounts will be automatically adjusted and presented with the VAT/taxes on a different line.

Eg: Lessons fees for £300 are presented as £240 and the remaining £60 are added to the VAT/taxes section. The same applies for Registration fees, whilst the Book price (which is tax-exempt) is shown in full for £25.

It’s important to remember that the amounts you specify when taking payments should include taxes, as they will be deducted automatically when preparing the invoice.

Should you have any questions or suggestions about this feature, feel free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com.

How to Send Emails to Your Students or Contacts

2011-04-17T00:00:00+01:00

Last week, we covered how to track what your students/contacts are interested in, for marketing purposes.

It is easy in NiftySchool to find all of the students who, for example:

are waiting for a class to be opened
have left the school, and may be interested in another course
are interested in exam training or specific courses
…and so on..

Sending emails

Most of the times you want to find a specific list of students because you want to send them an email communication.

For example you want to inform your contacts that you’re opening a new evening class.

We have just introduced a function that easily integrates NiftySchool with your email editor (e.g.: Outlook) so that you can quickly trigger emails to search results, without downloading excel spreadsheets and populating the recipient list manually.

Step 1: Perform a search

You can search for students by status (Students tab, on the right hand side), or use the advanced search that gives you more flexibility.
Once you click ‘Search’, you will see the list of matching results at the bottom of the page.

Step 2: Click ‘Send Email’

In every search results page, you will have the ability to send an email to the students shown.

The ‘Send Email’ button does not send and email straight away, it collects the email students’ email addresses for you to review first.

Step 3: Review the numbers

Once you clicked ‘Send Email’ you will be presented with a screen that recaps how many students you will send your email to.

This is important as not all of them may have an email associated, and you may miss someone.

At the bottom of the page you will see a list of these students, so that you can amend their details if needs be.

Step 4: Edit email and send

Once you are happy with the numbers, click on “Send using your email editor”. This will open your Outlook (or email editor of choice), auto-populating the recipients for you:

The recipients are set in the BCC field, so that email addresses don’t get mistakely shared with everyone.

Note that NiftySchool doesn’t send the email, it just help you prepare your email in Outlook. This assumes that you want to send the same email to all of the selected students.

The last thing you have to do is to fill in your email message and hit send, without worrying about keeping your Email client and database of students in sync.

This tiny function should speed up your marketing activities and help you keep information in a single place.

Track Student Interests to Better Target Your Marketing Activities

2011-04-11T00:00:00+01:00

Today I’m going to show you a simple way to record what students are interested in, for marketing purposes.

Under the ‘Misc’ tab in the student’s profile, you will find an ‘Interested in’ field:

This is a free field that you can populare as you like, you can store for example:

level of the class the student is interested in
course language
exam that needs to be taken
preferred schedule
…all of previous ones, comma separated

By storing this extra attribute, you gain the ability to filter students in the advanced search section:

It becomes then really easy to retrieve all the students you need to contact for a given marketing activity.

If you want to contact people that want French lessons, type ‘French’ and press search. If you want people who need to take the IELST exam, type ‘IELST’, and so on.

Is also worth noting that the “Interested in” search box allows for partial matches. This means that, for example, searches for ‘Italian’ and ‘Evening’ will both return a student whose interest is ‘Italian Evening’.

The ‘Interested in’ field features auto-completing suggestions, so that you can keep interests consistent across multiple students without the overhead of preconfiguing them.

As any other search result, you can dowload the list of matching students in Excel format, along with their address, email, phone numbers etc.
After clicking the search button, just follow the ‘download .xls’ link on the right hand side to save the file on your desktop.

With this simple technique you should be able to precisely target students for your marketing communications.

Should you have any questions, suggestions, or feel like sharing how you manage your marketing activities, please drop us a note at info@niftyschool.com.

Improved Support for Private Classes

2011-03-31T00:00:00+01:00

Hello everyone! With NiftySchool expanding to new countries and serving more and more schools we’re taking incremental steps to improve features and functionality that will benefit all of our customers.

The latest addition is improved support for private classes, also known as ‘one to ones’.

While you could always ‘simulate’ a private class by creating a standard class with a single student in it, the process was neither smooth or optimised.

Under the classes tab you will now find a new “Add private class” button that will serve this purpose better:

One to one classes are similar to standard classes, but they allow you to select one teacher and one student in a single go for quicker set up:

The student’s enrollment for the class is also created for you and added in the student’s Enrollments page:

You don’t need to create a private class for each individual lesson.
You can set up start and end dates according to the period in which the student will be attending – and track the attendance for each lesson.

In the private class’s page, you can edit attendance and track how long the lessons really lasted, in hours and minutes (eg: 1h 35m).

This is useful as private lessons often overrun and you may want to keep track of it to charge students accordingly.

All your private classes will appear in the Classes list with a orange ‘Private’ marker, and you can easily filter them by typing ‘Private’ in the search box.

This is just the first step towards better management of your private lessons, stay tuned for further updates and feel free to send your comments to info@niftyschool.com.

How To Add Student Specific Reminders

2011-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool provides an Alerts system that notifies you when something needs your attention.

When something needs taking care of, for example an overdue payment or a student with exceptionally poor attendance, the system will show a warning box in the general dashboard and student’s file page.

There are a number of predefined alerts in the system, but you can also set up your own custom alerts.

From today custom alerts can be optionally linked to students so that a warning message will be displayed in its file page at the right time.

Previously, custom alerts where ‘generic’ and only shown in the general dashboard.

The ability to link a custom alert/reminder to a student is useful when you want for example:

Remind the student to fill a questionnaire
Review his progress on a regular basis (you can schedule multiple reminders)
Call the student on a given day
..and so on.

Just go to the Alerts page and click ‘New Alert’:

The form will allow you to specify a description, the date of the reminder and the student it should be associated with (optional):

If associated with a student, the new alert will be displayed in his profile page:

With this update, it will be easier to associate reminders to the right students, and you won’t risk to miss them when you open the student’s profile pages!

How Much Money Do Language Schools Earn Enrolling Visa Students?

2011-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

In the UK and the US, visa students are a big business opportunity.

Students who apply for a Visa in your country, study for a longer period of time – guaranteeing a higher and more stable profit for the school.

But what exaclty is the impact that visa students have on the school revenue?

Is it advisable to go through the process of registering with the British Council (or equivalent local entity) and get the accreditation, or not?

We analised data from our top customers from August 2010 up to February 2011 and these are our findings:

1) 44.5% of the payments are received from Visa students

2) 40.1% of the students applied for a Visa.

This means that:

Without Visa students, the schools would half their revenue
Visa students spend 5-10% more than standard students

We feel it’s important to keep these figures under control, and that’s why we added a new ‘Payments from Visa’ report that allows you to check how the payments coming from visa students are doing in your school.

The new report tracks the payments coming from visa students and compares them with the total amount of payments taken.

You can access this report under the ‘Reports’ tab if you have Admin or Manager access with NiftySchool.

Should you want to know more about how NiftySchool’s support for Visa students works, feel free to book a demo by emailing us at info@niftyschool.com.

Visual Reports Help You Keep Your School Under Control

2011-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

You can never stress it enough, reporting is crucial for any school administration software.

Let’s say you “feel” there are fewer visa students than they used to be… but are you tracking how many of them are enrolled at any given time?

Can you easily compare how much money you’re making today against last year? or last month?

Or can you tell if the online Ad campaign you’ve run has brought you more students?

The only way to precisely answer these and other many questions you have about your business, is to look at the hard data.

Inspecting numbers and data is never easy, so we spent the last few weeks working ona a new reporting system that can help you identify how your school is doing in a more visual way:

The new reporting dashboard gives you an immediate feel of how the school is doing. We measure enrollments, payments, student status and more, and clear up/down arrows tell you what the trends are comparing today’s data with the previous month.

From the example above: Payments are up 14%, which is good, but Visa students are decreasing which may impact long term revenue – this tells you you need a strategy to get more Visa students!

For every metric exposed you can go in deeper detail clicking on the “view details” link, and see changes over time.

Here you see the number of students enrolled over the past three months, along with number of new students and leavers. There’s a dip between Christmas and the first days of the new year, but by the end of January the normal number of students has been restored.

With this sort of data on hand you can for example predict the students behaviour for next year and plan accordingly.

For every graph shown, there is a monthly summary table at the bottom. If you click on the numbers, you will download the list of mentioned students in excel format (eg: click on the number 23 above and you will download the list of students who left in December).

That means that, for example, you can easily:

Find out who left in December and send a promotion to start school again in January.
Find who heard about the school via Facebook, and offer a discount if they bring a friend for a trial lesson.
Find your top three agencies in the last six months and negotiate better rates.

Snapshots of your data are automatically collected by the system, so that you don’t need to save spreadsheets every week or every month, keeping manually track of your figures. You can always ‘go back in time’ and see what the numbers looked like in the past!

The payments report above shows you total amount of payments received between Jan 2009 and today. Note the trend indicators on the right hand side that show you which months improved and which ones got worse compared to the previous one (green/red arrows).

There are a number of reports already available, and with the new reporting engine in place, new ones will be easy to add in the near future.

For example it is now easy to see number of students per contact media, so that you can improve your marketing efforts and see the results over time.

Or students by nationality:

To see the new reports, just click on the “Reports” tab and choose the period you’re interested in using the date selector on the right hand side of the screen.

If your account is new or a new report has just been added, it may take a few days before a meaningful graph is shown, but keep track of your data on a regular basis, and all the hard work will be done by the system for you.

If you want to suggest a new report, or think we can improve an existing one, feel free to drop us an email at info@niftyschool.com.

Happy reporting!

How to Print a Weekly Class Attendance Register

2011-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Today we’re releasing a small update for schools that manage registers on a weekly basis.

When you browse to a class, NiftySchool presents you with the daily class register by default. You can download and print the daily register in Excel format by clicking on ‘Print daily register’ on the right hand side of the screen.

While this is good enough for most schools, it can be tedious if you manage registers on a weekly basis, as you would need to print up to five different registers per class.

We added a switch to show a full week at once, and to print a single weekly register per class:

By clicking the ‘week’ link under the date, the screen will switch to a weekly view and you will be able to print the weekly register in one go.

The register is printed by default in landscape mode and is also available for Callan and laboratory classes.

Speedup Teachers Schedule Management with Defaults

2011-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Some schools keep the teachers schedule very flexible. Many Callan schools for example swap teachers frequently during the duration of their courses and need to assign them on a per-lesson basis.

Flexibility comes at a price though, as you need to assign teachers for each and every lesson.

We just added a new feature so that you can specify a default teacher for a class.

The system will assign teachers to the right class automatically when a default for the class is specified.

For each one of your classes, go to the details page, and choose a teacher from the dropdown:

Then, go to your theachers schedule page, and click on the ‘Assign default teachers and save’ button, to automatically update the schedule.

Weekly and monthly reports will be automatically updated as well:

You can also assign all of the lessons to the default teachers and manually amend the specific lessons that need changing.

This does considerably speed up teachers schedule management, and still gives you the flexibility of the per-lesson assignments.

This works for both standard and Callan method classes.

If you have any questions or comments feels free to contact us at info@niftyschool.com

Take Into Account Holidays When Tracking Student Attendance

2011-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool provides a simple way to track attendances. You are always provided with the attendance percentage, calculated automatically comparing the number of lessons attended and the “expected” attendance hours.

However, students may occasionaly miss few lessons. You can mark absences as “authorised” if you do not want these to affect the attendance percentage.

This feature is useful for students planned vacations or other times you know they are allowed to miss school.

For public holidays, you will need to add “authorized absences” for each student individually, which is a tedious and error prone process.

NiftySchool now provides a way to add holidays to the system so that any absence matching the given dates can be treated as authorized.

To add public holidays/global authorized absences, go to the Configuration tab and click on the ‘Holidays Calendar’ link.

Add the holiday start and end date, along with a description:

This will appear in the list of public holidays:

These settings will be automatically reflected in every student’s attendance calendar, and will be displayed as ‘Holiday’.

Holidays will never be taken into account when computing the expected attendance, so you can use this for real holidays or for instances in which your school is closed and no student is supposed to attend.

We hope you find this feature useful! If you have comments or questions, feel free to drop us a note at info@niftyschool.com.

Verify How Much You Earned Today with Daily Cashier Reports

2011-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Today, we are adding a new feature related to the payments section.

If you want to track how many payments you received on a given day, it is useful to have a separate breakdown that tells you who has taken the payments and what payment method has been used.

This makes it easier to identify mistakes and verify the total amounts received. It also lets you identify who made the mistake; by splitting by type it tells you if you need to double-check your cashier, your bank account, or your online PayPal account.

Go to your payments page and click on the ‘Daily Cashier’ button:

With this grid you can verify:

total amounts per employee
total amounts per payment type (cash, cards, or other)
total amounts per type and employee

It also provides you with links to the details of the payments that generate the figures and a calendar selector to navigate among different dates.

This helps you better manage your incoming payments, the most important part of your business!

If you have any questions or suggestions about the new features, feel free to drop us an email at info@niftyschool.com.

Extend Enrollment Dates When Taking Payments

2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

NiftySchool provides a flexible way to track payments and enrollment.

Some schools make the students pay in advance, others require weekly payments regardless of the schedule, and others enroll students even if they have not yet paid.

To support this level of flexibility, payments are not strictly linked to enrollments in NiftySchool.
Although this is generally a good thing (you can use your own accounting solution to track payments), it has its drawbacks.

When you take a payment that covers two weeks, for example, you specify ‘covers from’ and ‘up to’ dates accordingly:

Then, go to the enrollments tab and update the enrollment end date:

This is a duplication of work that is both tedious and error prone.

You can now extend the enrollment dates directly when taking a payment. If the payment you are taking is meant to ‘extend’ enrollment dates, check the ‘update enrollment dates’ checkbox, and select the classes the student is paying for.

The system automatically proposes current enrollments, enrollments that are due to start, and enrollments that have ended in the past couple of months.

As soon as you click ‘Save & Confirm’, the selected enrollments’ dates will be updated.

What if I make a mistake?

If you take a payment and extend enrollment dates by mistake, you can always delete it. The dates will be rolled back to their original value, which is saved behind the scenes.

You can also rollback a single enrollment by clicking ‘update enrollment dates’ and un-ticking the classes that need to be rolled back.

If you do not tick the ‘update enrollment dates’ box, the enrollment dates will be left untouched.

It is also worth noting that the system prevents the most obvious mistakes:

You cannot extend an enrollment and set an end date that is earlier than the current date.
You cannot rollback an enrollment extension if its dates have changed since you took the payment.

In these special scenarios, you need to go to the enrollment tab and fix the enrollment dates manually.

We hope this helps you speed up your payments and enrollments tracking, keep your data neat and consistent.

Edit Class Attendances for Weeks at a Time

2010-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

A few days ago, we introduced a way to speed up attendance tracking that allows you to loop through your classes, editing daily attendance and quickly moving to the next class.

We are now releasing another improvement: editing attendance for an entire week at one time.

To edit attendance for an entire week, go to the class register, and click edit attendance. On the daily attendance page, you will find a new button: ‘Edit entire week’:

Click the button, and the page will switch into a ‘weekly’ view:

From this screen you can:

Edit attendances for the entire week
Go to the previous/next week
Jump to other classes’ weekly attendance

The same weekly attendance editor is also available for Callan Method classes, where the 1st and 2nd hours will be shown:

…and for self-study/laboratory classes:

This significantly improves entry speed when you need to batch update multiple days.

We hope you find the new feature useful. Feel free to give us feedback at info@niftyschool.com.

Speed Up Attendance Tracking for Your Classes

2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Today, we are releasing am update to speed up attendance tracking.

Some of our schools input attendances for all of the classes at a given time each the day. If this is your practice, you will probably find yourself iterating through your class registers to update the attendances, which is tedious and time consuming.

We have added a button to automatically save class attendances and move to the next class simultaneously, without being redirected to the class register page. This saves a few clicks per class, speeding up the process.

When saving attendances press ‘Save Attendances and Edit Next Class’ instead of the usual ‘Save Attendances’:

This will save the attendances for the current class (Derby) and will open the edit attendances screen for the next class in the list (Leeds):

Keep doing this until you loop through all of your classes, and all of the attendances are updated. When you get to the last class, the system will automatically bring you back to the first on the list.

If you have a block of classes that you do not need to update, just use the links on the right to go straight to the edit attendances page of the class that interests you.

SMS: The Quickest Way to Keep in Touch With Your Students

2010-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

Communication with students is an important daily task.

They need to be contacted if class schedules change, if a payment is due, or if their attendance is low.

As of today, you can send your students SMS messages directly from NiftySchool.
Let’s see how:

1) Enable SMS delivery in the configuration.

SMS need to be explicitly enabled from the configuration. SMS messaging is switched off by default because there is an extra cost involved. You do not want your staff to send them out unless they are allowed to do so.

Choose the phone number that will be used in the ‘From’ field of the messages that you send. Messages sent using NiftySchool will come from this phone number. You can use
a shared office number, or your personal mobile number.

Once you accept the terms and enable the service, you can move on to a student’s page and send the first message.

2) Go to the student profile and click on ‘Send SMS’.

3) Fill in the details and send.

To send the message, you need to fill the following fields:

From: this is the number from which the student will receive the message, automatically populated with your default number specified in the configuration (but you can change it if needed). Usually this is the school’s phone number.
To: This is the mobile phone number of the student, in international format. This is taken from the student file, and automatically converted to the correct format (00 + country code + number). You can change it before sending if incorrect.
Body: This is the text of the message you want to send — a maximum of 160 characters.

If you want to send a test message, you can either create a fake student with your number or change the number in the form before sending.

4) Check whether the SMS has been sent.

After sending the message, a status report will be shown.
It usually takes the carrier/network operator a few seconds to send the message, but you can check that it has been submitted correctly.

5) Check and download reports in Excel format.

In the Stats/Reports section, you can now see a list of all of the messages that have been sent.
You can see who sent the messages, to which student and when.

The list of messages can also be downloaded in Excel format, and filtered by date.

6) Pricing – how much does this cost?

SMS cost £0.07/each (less than standard operator rate) and will be billed on top of your standard subscription on a monthly basis. You will receive separate payment request to your PayPal account, with the correct amount.

For example, if you send 100 messages you will be billed £7. Consider how much time you would spend calling the students instead of sending them a message.

Only messages successfully delivered to the phones will be charged: you will not pay for messages sent to dead numbers or phones that are not reachable.

We hope you enjoy the new feature! If you have any issues, feel free to let us know.

How to Track Laboratory and Self-Study Attendance in Your Language School

2010-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

For many language schools, tracking attendance correctly is vital. If you are enrolling visa students, at any given time, you may need to know how many hours the student is required to attend, how many hours have been attended, and the relative percentage.

Although this is fairly straightforward for standard classes taught regularly throughout the week at the same predefined times, it can be difficult if you give your students the ability to make up hours with laboratory or self-study classes.

A laboratory is a room or designated area inside the school where your students can use personal computers, reading material, or other tools provided by the school.

Self-study classes are special classes in which the students read, speak with other students or teachers, or study on their own as part of a program defined by the school.

In either case, you may want to track how many hours the student studied, and take thouse hours into account in the attendance percentage calculation (e.g., 10 hrs/week).

This is a convenient way to give your students an opportunity to recoup missed lessons.

NiftySchool allows you to create special ‘Laboratory’ classes that can be used for this purpose. Let’s see how they work:

1) Go to the ‘Classes’ tab, and click on ‘Add lab class’:

Lab classes are not bound to specific times of the day because students can enter and exit at their will (or according to the school rules).

2) Add students to the laboratory class:

Add students to the laboratory as you would normally do with a fixed class. You can also set an expected ‘weekly goal’ for each student; it will be used to compute his expected number of hours.

For example if you set a goal of 10 hours per week for a student, he will reach 100% attendance only after spending 10 hours in the laboratory. It does not matter if the 10 hours are completed in one day or spread evenly across the week as long as the student meets the goal.

Weekly goals can differ among students, but you can keep them all in the same laboratory/self-study class for your convenience or split them into more than one lab class.

3) Track how many hours and minutes have been attended:

On a daily basis, you can enter the time spent in the laboratory or self-studying, using the “Xh Ym” format. You can be as precise as you want: the percentage calculation will be accurate to the minute! If you want to input two and a half hours, you can specify the attendance as ‘2h 30m’, ‘2.5h’, or ‘150m’.

Attendance can exceed the weekly goal, allowing students to recoup previous poor attendance. Please note that this could potentially bring the percentage above 100% (which means the student is attending more than expected).

Zero-hrs/week lab enrollments are also supported. You can use this option when students are not strictly required to self-study.

4) Enjoy precise attendance reporting:

Once a laboratory/self-study enrollment has been set up, the student’s calendar will be updated to reflect the new expected attendance.
You can then edit the student’s attendance just as you do for standard and Callan method classes.

Happy laboratory and self-study classes tracking!

Added Support for American Visas and US Date Formats

2010-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

With NiftySchool expanding to the U.S. market, we have updated a few sections of the user interface to conform to the U.S. standards.

Language schools in different countries need the system to reflect the terminology and conventions used in their country.

Affected areas include the following:

Visa names
Date formats (you can now use the MM/DD/YYYY convention)
Updated naming conventions throughout the system

You can see an example of the difference between the UK and US version below:

Language schools in the UK keep track of passport number and expiration date for their Visa students. Dates take the European format: DD/MM/YYYY.

American schools are more interested in the SEVIS ID and the expiration date of the student’s financial record. Note that dates automatically use the U.S. convention, MM/DD/YYYY, in the date fields and calendar helpers.

As an administrator, you can change your country settings from the Account/Billing screen:

Is this only for the U.K. and U.S.?

No. Labels, Visa names, and dates can be modified on a per-country basis, so feel free to send your customisations to info@niftyschool.com.

If your already have a NiftySchool account and you are not in the U.S., don’t worry. Your settings have not changed, and your user interface has been left untouched.

How to Handle Contacts Who Are Not Yet Customers

2010-10-13T00:00:00+01:00

Every school deals with a certain amount of communication with prospective students before they sign up for a class.

This usually involves sending e-mails, talking on the phone, and following up with more information.

Every school has a different way to track these interactions, but information is usually kept in e-mails or Excel spreadsheets.

Today, we are releasing the first in a series of improvements to let you handle your contacts directly in NiftySchool.

We have added a new status: ‘Contact’. Contacts are people you interact with who are not yet customers.

To create a contact, simply use the ‘new student’ link, and select ‘Contact’ from the status dropdown.

When a student is flagged as ‘Contact’, his dashboard will be replaced by a single text area in which you can store notes about him.

The contact’s notes will be shared among your staff so that everyone is always up-to-date. The contact’s phone numbers and email address will also be displayed for quick reference.

You can search for contacts using the ‘Contacts’ filter on the right hand side of the student’s dashboard or by typing the name in the search box, as you do for your regular students.

As you can do with any other search results, the list of contacts can be downloaded in Excel format. You can then use it for marketing or statistical purposes.

As soon as you change the status to one of the standard ones, the Contact will be treated as a normal student, and the dashboard will switch back to the default behaviour.

All of your contact notes will be preserved in the student file.

Tracking Book Inventory

2010-10-12T00:00:00+01:00

As a language school, you may sell books, CDs, or other support material for your students.

Callan method schools, for example, are heavily book-centered, and need to keep track of how many books they have in stock for the different levels and languages supported.

This is also true for traditional schools. They usually have a preferred grammar book or guide specific to a given exam, such as TOEFL or IELTS.

NiftySchool allows you to track your inventory and automatically increase/decrease the amount of items in stock based on the payments you take.

Go to the Payment Categories configuration page and enable inventory tracking for specific payment types (e.g. Beginner’s Grammar Book)

Click on the payment type you want to edit, or create a new one. The number of items in stock will be displayed in the ‘Inventory’ column on the right.

You can enable/disable inventory tracking for different items individually. Once tracking is enabled, you can enter the amount of items you have in stock.

The amount of items in stock will automatically decrease when taking payments with this payment type. From the Payment Type details screen, you can also periodically update the number of items in stock (e.g., when you buy new books).

When taking a new payment, the number of items left in stock will be shown by the payment type.

If you record a payment by mistake, do not worry: The amount will increase by one if you decide to delete the payment, keeping the total amount automatically in sync.

Happy inventory tracking!

Quickly Update Student Status

2010-10-08T00:00:00+01:00

Today we are releasing a slight improvement to the student profile page.

In the past, to change the status of a student (Active, Suspended, Leaver, etc.), you had to browse to the student details page, pick the right status from the dropdown, and save.

This operation is executed quite often, so we improved it by creating a shortcut.

Click on the status badge by the student name (the colored one) and a popup will appear.

Pick the status you want to assign from the pop-up and, the job is done. The status will be instantly updated in the database.

There is no need to change page or re-save the profile.

We hope you enjoy the new shortcut!

Print Payment Receipts and Invoices

2010-10-01T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool allows you to record payments and expenses. When taking payments, you may want to issue an invoice or receipt of payment.

Once you save the payment, simply click on the ‘print receipt’ link at the top right corner, and an Excel file containing the receipt will generate with your payment details.

The invoice will include the student information (name, address, country) and the details of the payment (date, payment description, amount, payment method).

The payment will also automatically calculate and report taxes such as VAT, but this feature can be disabled on demand.

You can print the file as it is or save it on your desktop and modify it before printing.

Manage Weekent Courses

2010-09-05T00:00:00+01:00

Most language schools only run courses from Monday to Friday.

We always thought it would be a good idea to support Saturdays and Sundays but we did not want to clutter the user interface if it was not necessary.

But in the last couple of weeks, we have been in touch with schools that teach classes over the weekend. They need to keep track of weekend enrollment and record attendances accordingly.

We decided the right time has come to enable Saturday and Sunday support in NiftySchool.

You can enable the new option from the configuration screen:

Once the option is enabled, a few screens will be updated:

You can select Saturdays and Sundays when setting up a class.

The attendance calendar will show the full week.

If your school is closed on the weekend, just leave the new option turned off and your screens will remain as you know them.

This ensures that you can use the full functionality if desired, but keeps the interface clean and uncluttered if you are not interested.

Make Sure You Get Paid

2010-08-30T00:00:00+01:00

Cash flow is important for small and big schools alike, especially in a recession.

Getting paid is vital for 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 is difficult to track precisely when students have to pay. Some schools are strict and only enroll 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 stay on top of your payments due 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 appear 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.

Only active students (or trial students) 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 number of alerts, especially if you have a large number of students.

If you find yourself checking too many alerts or you just do not need them, feel free to turn them off from the configuration page.

Alerts can be enabled and disabled individually from the configuration screen.

Add New Students In A Snap

2010-08-25T00:00:00+01:00

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 more.

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 register a student.

We simplified the “new student” screen so that you only need to specify 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 the details page.

We also improved the way you add students to classes. From the class register page, you can add new students and enroll them simultaneously or select from the ones already in the system.

This is useful when you are 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 only 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. We hope you enjoy the update!

Mark Alerts as Checked and Add Custom Ones

2010-08-24T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Added Support For Multiple Currencies

2010-08-12T00:00:00+01:00

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!

How to Check Student Attendance over Different Periods of Time

2010-08-06T00:00:00+01:00

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.

New Alerts Help You Manage Visa Students

2010-08-05T00:00:00+01:00

Recently, one of our customers in the UK was inspected by the UK Border Agency (http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk) as part of his accreditation process.

Institutions wishing to enrol visa students need to follow a strict set of rules, and report to the UKBA when certain conditions are met, for example:

A students misses 10 days of his or her course of study without your reasonably granted permission.
The attendance percentage falls under a given threshold.
The visa has expired.
The identification document has expired.

To support these scenarios and help schools have more control over their visa student accounts, we expanded and improved the alert system to provide a wider range of alarms.

The alerts system allows you to both spot cases that need to be handled immediately (e.g. ‘ID document expired’) and to take care of cases which may become problems in the future (e.g. those students whose ID documents will expire within the next 30 days).

You can then contact your students and resolve the problem before it’s too late.

By clicking on the alert link, you will be taken to a detail page which lists those students matching the specific alert, along with contextual information.

For example, if the alert notifies the user on an attendance percentage falling below 85%, the attendance percentage for each student will be shown.

The full list of alerts include:

Visa expired
Visa expiring in 7 days
Visa expiring in 30 days
Visa details need to be checked
Attendance falls under 85%
Attendance falls under 80%
ID document has expired
ID document expiring in 30 days
A course with visa students is expiring
A student has missed three lessons in a row

To access the new alerts, just follow the Alerts link in your Dashboard.

We’re also planning to add other alerts. Feel free to suggest what you need the most using our contact form.

NiftySchool Prevents Duplicate Student Entries

2010-07-14T00:00:00+01:00

It’s nice to have a clean database of students. Sometimes, though, we forget that someone is already registered. Without checking, we insert a duplicate entry.

This happens when students return to the school multiple times over a long period, or when we mistakenly process our paper files twice.

Fixing duplicates is particularly annoying as you need to delete one record and make sure that the information is correctly stored in the other one.

This means a lot of manual checking and a waste of time; it is definitely better not to duplicate data in the first place.

From now on, if you create a student entry with a name and surname which already exist in the system (e.g. John Smith), a warning will be returned as follows:

1. The system tells you which student matches the name and surname you just entered, with a link to edit it.

2. If you want to create a duplicate entry because there really are two different John Smiths to register, just tick the Allow duplicates box, and click ‘save’. A new record with the same name will be created.

We hope you enjoy these additional features that will help you keep your database clean and tidy.

Fine-Grained Student Enrolments

2010-07-14T00:00:00+01:00

A customer of ours recently needed an addition to the enrolment form for his Callan classes.

This school allows students to register for variable number of hours per day (e.g. two hours on Monday, two on Wednesday, and one on Thursday).

This scenario is now supported in NiftySchool, as you can see from the following screenshot:

If you feel that there are too many boxes to tick, simply use the ‘all’ and ‘none’ links, which will save you a few clicks.

With this fine-grained setup, the stored ‘hours per week’ might not match the enrolment settings.

Example: You check two hours on Monday and Wednesday, and one hour on Thursday. It is obvious that the student is attending 5 hours per week, but you were allowed to set a different number.

This redundant and possibly conflicting information made it difficult to determine how to compute the student’s attendance percentage.

To solve this problem, from now on, the number of hours per week will inferred solely from the days/hours checked on the form.

The variable number of hours per day is also reflected in the student dashboard, so you can quickly spot this sort of enrolment.

Along with these changes, we also updated the algorithm that computes the attendance percentage.

Now, the ‘expected number of hours’ will be based on the student’s daily schedule. This will provide more precise and accurate percentages, especially for enrolments starting or ending midweek or with a variable number of hours per day.

We hope that you enjoy the changes and find the new fine-grained enrolments to be useful.

Print Teachers Weekly Timetable

2010-06-12T00:00:00+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced a new module to manage your teachers’ schedules. Today, we’re adding the ability to save the weekly schedule in Excel format so that it can be efficiently printed out.

Each teacher is assigned a colour so that you can quickly spot when she or he is supposed to teach.
Classes using the Callan method will have two rows, as a different teacher can be assigned to each hour.

By default the current week timetable is shown, but you can select the week you want and print for the following weeks in advance.

To print the timetable, go to the Teachers tab and click on the timetable link on the right shoulder.

Download Student Payments in Excel

2010-06-02T00:00:00+01:00

In NiftySchool you can easily track payments. Receptionists can take payments and file them in the system straight away along with the student’s info.

Accountants, on the other hand, need to reconcile payments and download them in a format that’s easier to manage and manipulate.

From today you can download the payments in the system in MS Excel format. Just go to the Payments tab and click on the Download .xls link.

By default, the last two months are shown and downloaded, but you can change the dates and download only the payments you’re interested in. Useful for example if you update your books on a monthly basis.

Handling Student Authorized Absences

2010-05-31T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool offers a quick way to check students attendance percentage. This is calculated comparing the number of attended hours against the number of hours the student was expected to attend.

This percentage is important for schools enrolling visa students and schools issuing attendance certificates, and needs to be accurate.

Until now, every absence decreased the attendance percentage and there was no way to say “I know this student won’t be here, please don’t count him as absent in the stats”.

This scenario needed to be taken into account for accurate percentage calculation, so we’ve implemented a new feature: authorized absences.

In the student file, you will find a new ‘Authorized absences’ link. Following the link you will be able to specify all of the authorized absences, along with the reason why the student is not attending.

Dates are inclusive, so if you need to specify a single day of absence, just input the same date twice, both in the start date and the end date field.

The authorized absences are marked in the attendance calendar as Authorized so that you can quicky spot them.

Click on the authorized absence box, and you will quickly see the reason of the absence.

Hope you find the new feature useful, and enjoy accurate percentages!

Different Ways to Print Class Registers

2010-05-27T00:00:00+01:00

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve NiftySchool.
Recently, we updated the class register templates.

Some language schools want to not only track attendance, but also want their students to sign a register and note entry and exit times.

This is useful if you are dealing with visa students, and want a proof that they have attended particular lessons. It also reminds the teachers to log in the times so that an accurate attendance percentage can be calculated later on.

We have added a new template for the registers. This template will be printed in landscape mode, making room for the new fields that have been introduced.

Take a look here at the new register templates that are available:

For normal classes, entry and leaving times and signature columns have been introduced.

For Callan classes, there are signatures and entry time and leaving time fields for each hour.

Using the new templates is not mandatory. You can keep using the standard template if you don’t need the new columns.
To enable the new layout, go to Configuration/General Settings, and select Use Landscape Register.

New Teachers Schedule Module

2010-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

Hello everyone. Today, we’re announcing a new improvement to NiftySchool: the Teachers Schedule module.

What is this all about? Simply put, you can now assign a teacher to each class for each day of the week. This allows you to:

make sure each class has a teacher assigned to it.
track the number of hours that each teacher is working.

When you click on the new Teachers tab, you’ll be presented with a screen similar to the following:

This screen is both simple and powerful, as you can:

assign teachers to your classes in one go.
edit week by week, with the previous and next functions.
edit only the days in which classes are taught so you make no mistakes (e.g. Class B).
assign one teacher per hour if you use the Callan method (e.g. Class C).
update the class register accordingly, showing the teacher(s) assigned on given days.

Once teachers have been assigned to classes, click on the show monthly summary link to go to the Monthly Hours Summary.
This helps you to verify how many hours a teacher has taught per month, along with a weekly breakdown.

Both the number of hours per week and total hours per month are shown, to allow you to facilitate reconciliation for those schools in which teachers are paid on a weekly basis.

We hope you find the new features useful. As usual, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a note.

Handle Classes Taught On Specific Days Of The Week

2010-05-17T00:00:00+01:00

NiftySchool was originally born with Callan method classes in mind. Language schools using the Callan method often run classes every day Monday to Friday, so this was the default configuration in the database.

In reality, not all classes are equal. Many schools run classes only a few days a week, and want to track them properly.

We’re introducing a new configuration option, so that the days of the week when classes are taught can be correctly specified.

Thanks to this change you can now handle all the possible schedules, from daily classes to weekly lessons, and everything in between.

To see this new options, click on the Classes tab, select the class you want to edit and follow the edit details link.

When creating a new class, all of the week days will be selected by default, but you’re free to customise them to reflect your class calendar.

What other parts of the system are affected by this change?

Student enrollments will show the class days
The hours per day will be inferred from the days a week

Absences are not shown if class is not taught on a day
Attendance percentage is calculated accordingly

We hope you find the change useful. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment in the section below. Enjoy!

Tracking Students' Attendance Percentage

2010-05-10T00:00:00+01:00

Many language schools need to track students’ attendance percentage. This is true especially for visa students, as they have a minimum attendance requirement in order to maintain their visas.

Schools are required by law to inform the government if a student’s attendance drops below a certain threshold.

Starting today, NiftySchool allows you to compare expected attendance against the real attendance, both as number of hours and as a global percentage.

Weekly and monthly stats are available by clicking the attendance boxes in the Student Calendar screen.

Also, a total attendance percentage is shown on the right shoulder of the screen for quick reference.

It is now easier than ever to maintain control over your students and know when intervention is required. We hope you enjoy the update!

Try NiftySchool with Two of Your Classes for Free

2010-04-20T00:00:00+01:00

You’re a language school owner. You’ve seen the NiftySchool Web site. You might be interested in trying the software out, but let’s face it: adopting a new database is a hassle.

Until now we’ve provided a two-month trial, so that you could input a few classes and students and get a feel for the product.
In reality, however, this is not a great way to try a new product.

When you have the two-month deadline in mind, you’re unlikely to put enough data into the software. You know this will be a waste of time if you decide not to adopt it. You also know you can’t accurately assess the software until you start using it properly.

This is a lose-lose situation, as you waste your time, and we do not have the full opportunity to show your how useful our software is.

That’s why we decided to change our trial policy!

The two-month limit is gone. You can use a fully functional version of NiftySchool for free, with the only restriction of managing up to two classes. Unlimited students. Unlimited documents. Unlimited users.

Why is this a great idea?

No need to migrate all of your students.
You can try it in parallel with your current solution.
Get acquainted with the system, and pay only when you become serious about using it full time.

Take a chance to use it for a semester, or for a module or unit, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

Why Coloured Enrolment Forms Are Easier To Use

2010-04-17T00:00:00+01:00

Are you getting confused when tracking your students’ enrolments?

There are cases in which students might have many different enrolments, perhaps because they returned to school after a break, or because they have been moved to different classes multiple times.

In a language school database, it is essential to track each enrolment period separately with its own start date, end date, and expected attendance.

A long list of enrolments can be confusing, however, because it forces you to visually scan all of the entries to find the one you want to edit.

Today, we’re releasing a minor improvement so that the active enrolments are shown using a different background colour.
This will help you to identify which classes the student is attending now, and which classes he attended in the past.

In addition, the student’s overall start date and last paid day date (current expected leaving date) will be inferred from the enrolment dates, so you don’t need to input such information twice.

We hope these changes will help you to manage your enrolments more easily, so enjoy!

Improved Student Attendance

2010-04-12T00:00:00+01:00

Hello — today, we’re releasing a few improvements to the student attendance screen. Feedback from our users made clear that a few refinements were needed, and we’re glad to announce that they are ready to be released.

NiftySchool has two primary ways to manage student attendance:

From the class register, attendance can be set for a specific day/class.
From the student profile, multiple attendances can be set from a calendar-like view.

The updates regarding the student calendar view are as follows:

Months are now shown in reverse order
Weeks without enrolments/attendance are hidden
Partial attendances are now highlighted
Additional attendance details
Additional attendance hours summaries

Let’s explore these details further:

Months are now shown in reverse order

Months were previously shown in ascending order (Jan, Feb, Mar and so on). This made perfect sense, but it was difficult to quickly see the latest attendance details spanning several months.

You needed to scoll to the bottom of the page to view the most recent month. This was quite irritating for long attendance periods.

Now you’ll find the last month at the top of the page, and you can scroll down to review previous months’ attendance details.

Weeks without enrolments are hidden

When enrolments didn’t cover a whole month, the calendar ended up wasting lots of screen space, showing ‘empty’ days.

Now, weeks without enrolments or attendances are hidden so that the calendar looks more compact and easier to understand.

Partial attendances are shown in orange

For Callan schools, it was difficult to distinguish between full attendances (two hours) and partial attendances (first or second hour only): they were all shown in green.

Now, partial attendances are shown in orange: it is then very easy to spot them at a glance between the full attendances.

Please note that attendances are shown as partial only if the student is supposed to attend both hours (According to the enrolment setup).

Attendance details/explanation

In certain instances, it was formerly unclear how many hours a student was supposed to attend class on a given day. This happens, for example, when an enrollment status is changed, but the student remains in the same class.

For instance: A student attending only one hour for a period and then switching to a full attendance will show full attendances (green boxes), but a different number of attended hours, which can be confusing.

After Clicking on an attendance box, a popup will tell you how many hours the student was expected to attend, versus how many hours have actually been attended.

A link will also allow you to go to the class register for that day to double-check any relevant class notes.

Attendance summaries

One of the most important things about tracking attendances is being able to see how many hours/days a student has attended during a given period of time.

This is useful to reconcile the payments received and to ensure visa students have completed the minimum number of hours required.

The new features have been applied automatically to all accounts, so no action is required on your side to start using them.
This is the beauty of having your management software hosted online — you always have the latest and most updated version without any hassles.

We hope you enjoy the updates, and if you have any questions, feel free to add a comment using the form below.

Handling Suspended Students

2010-03-30T00:00:00+01:00

Beginning today, we are implementing a slight change to how suspended students are handled in the class registers.
A student is suspended when, while enrolled in a class, he has agreed to not attend lessons between two given dates.

Until now, suspended students were listed in the class register like normal students, to ensure they were clearly enrolled in school, though not permitted to attend classes temporarily.

This was the initial intended proctice, but it proved to be confusing. Teachers tended to mark those students as absent, and receptionists could be misled when seeing the same students in the class register.

Clearly, some redesigning was necessary to resolve the confusion.

From now on, suspensions will show up in the class register screen, but will be listed at the bottom of the page in a clearly separate list.

Likewise, the enrolment count in the class list page won’t include the suspended users, so that you always know whether there is currently room for more people in the class.

Furthermore, the printed register has been updated and will not include suspended students.

These changes should help to clarify the effect of suspending a student on the class register and give you have a better picture of your class status.
Hope you enjoy the update!

Added Passport Handling

2010-03-29T00:00:00+01:00

For many language schools, it’s very important to track passport details or identity card numbers. This is mandatory, for example, when the school is dealing with a student who has applied for a student visa.

Until now, in NiftySchool, you could store passport details in a generic “Visa notes” field. This is usually sufficient as you could store details in whatever format you liked and could write as much information as necessary.

However, one problem arose: when receptionists were registering new students, receptionists oftern forgot to request passport details, which are vital information.

We then added a separate field for this purpose. Seeing the blank field will remind receptionists to ask for this data and complete the field when needed.

This is a tiny change, but it helps schools to maintain updated and consistent databases of their students.

Quick Access Student Profile

2010-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

One of the cornerstones of NiftySchool is speed. It’s very important for a language school administration tool to be able to access students’ profiles in a snap.

Imagine your receptionists during a busy day — you don’t want them to fiddle with the database and waste time, while a student is waiting in front of them!

The quickest way to access student data is using the search box, which is always available on the top right corner so that you can use it regardless of which screen is before you.

The search box is quite powerful, and you can search by:

Surname: e.g., type “Smith”
Name: e.g., type “John”
Date of birth: e.g., type “23/08/1982”
Unique Identifier: e.g., type “10234”

Searching by date of birth can be particularly useful with students who cannot spell their names correctly, or whose name can be spelled in different ways (think of Asian names).

The search box also auto-completes surnames as you type, helping you speed up your search.