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Will

Will manages the business on a day-to-day basis, responsible for a sales and demonstration team; operations and is the primary contact for pre-sales support.

Importing Teachers for Shared Classes from SEEMIS

By Software Updates

Great news, Parents Booking can now import all teachers for shared classes.

Before, whether you were importing your school’s data from a CSV spreadsheet or the automatic data import, any classes which were shared and would import with just one teacher, and invariably this would be the wrong teacher for parents’ evening purposes. Similarly, sometimes schools needed extra teachers added to a class code, and there was a lot of need for the Teachers > Copy/Move Class Codes feature. By and large, this will be a thing of the past for you now.

Being able to import all teachers for all shared classes will save a huge amount of time and work, and makes the use of the automatic data feed from SEEMIS (provided by Groucpall Xporter), as explained in the video to the right, which gives a very quick demonstration of how this will work.

Going forwards, we recommend that all SEEMIS schools which use the automatic data import turn OFF the ‘Main Class Teacher’ setting which is found directly above the ‘Upload Data’ button on the Upload Data page, before running data imports.

This will mean that for any classes that 2+ teachers ‘share’, the class will be linked to all teachers.

Then, when you create a parents’ evening you’ll see 2+ teachers for all these classes.

All you have to do then (on Dashboard > Options > Edit the Teachers) is either:

  1. Un-tick any teachers who do not want/need appointments made with them,
  2. OR where a class code will have multiple teachers available for it, you a can use the Yes/No questions in the further two right-hand columns to set rules related to whether parents can book the teachers together into a shared appointment, or book the teachers separately, with the default No/No settings meaning parents need to choose one or the other.

If your school has been using CSV spreadsheets, even although it has access to the automatic data feed – perhaps because you liked the flexibility of editing data in the CSV before importing it – this is probably a very good time to look at the automatic data import again, because it should provide much more than the spreadsheets do, importing all options for all classes, meaning that not only are parents’ evenings easier to set up, but if you need to make changes later you have all the teacher options you might need already imported.

If you would like our help ‘migrating’ from CSV to the automatic data import, or want to test the automatic import to see multiple teachers importing, or have any questions about how this will work, please just contact support@parents-booking.com / 01463 731000.

As ever, please be careful not to overwrite data for any parents’ evenings you have set up currently – if you have parents’ evenings set up, and want our advice on when or how to impor a new dataset which includes teachers for classes with multiple teachers, please just ask.

Watch this quick video for a full explainer.

Winter 2023 Software Update

By Software Updates

Hello and welcome to the Winter 2023 Software Update for Parents Booking.

This term (Autumn 2023-Winter 2023) has been quite quiet with regards to big and exciting new Parents Booking features, because over the summer we completed a big behind-the-scenes task, which took over a year to implement, which significantly changed the underlying database and other technologies we use. This was necessary as part of our continued growth, but did mean we weren’t able to add new features and products/modules at the usual rate. As such, below is a less-glamorous list of new features than usual, perhaps, but there’s also a lot of exciting work ahead now that that project has been completed.

New Features:

Direct integration with Arbor
Schools which use Arbor can now import data directly into Parents Booking. Just ask us to send your school a request to data share, which you will later simply approve in Arbor > System > Partnered Apps.

Scottish (SEEMIS) schools can now import all teachers for shared classes
This should be a huge improvement for schools wen setting up parents’ evenings, meaning much less of having to move class codes around and add missing teachers. There’s a whole blog with a video about this you should read, if this applies to your school, here.

Admin users can now login from Firefly
Schools who use Firefly can now have their Admin users login to Parents Booking from the Apps > Bookings SSO button in the staff user’s Firefly portal. Previously it was only parents and teachers who could do this.

It’s important that schools create Admin users for the required staff. This blog post explains more.

Admin users will need to have a personalised Parents Booking admin account set up for this to work. Go to Parents Booking > Set Up School > Usernames and Passwords > Add/Manage Additional Admin Users to add an admin user with an email address which matches the Admin user’s Firefly account.

More new features when inviting parents to book
Now you can search by parents/carers who have been invited or not, and filter/search for parents more easily. We are also mail merging the student and parent/carers’ login info into the default invite message – although you can remove this if you want. This is particularly helpful where a school uses the login by username/password method, because it tells parents their login and that makes it easier for them to reset their initial/first-time password and login.

Parents/carers can use vouchers to pay for events/clubs
Where the government or other school-approved vouchers can be used by parents to pay for or towards events, clubs and wraparound care, there is new functionality to allow a school to assign these vouchers’ value to the parent, giving them a ‘voucher balance’ only they can see, and lets a parent spend this balance (until it has been used) rather having to pay.

This feature is brand new, and we’d love to work with schools who have an interest in using it – to make sure it does everything it needs to. Can you let us know if you want to use this feature, and we’ll help you set it up?

Assign events and clubs to teachers
You can now select multiple teachers and assign them to an event, club or wraparound, meaning it shows on their Dashboard when they login. This allows them to view its settings, bookings, and other stats/info.

American/Canadian DOB Format: We’ve made some changes to how we process CSVs which contain an American or Canadian DOB format (e.g. mm/dd/yyyy), so that these upload more successfully and without schools having to make CSV changes.

Admin User/Pass Resetting: We’ve made it easier for Admin users to request a password reset via the login page.

Reminder/Info Emails CC’d to All Admins: Account and other reminder emails will now be CC’d to all Admin users, rather than the main admin.

Coming Soon:

  • We’re half-way through re-skinning our Admin and Teacher web pages, so that they’ll look much more modern and be easier to use. There’s a screenshot to the right showing an example of how this will look.
  • We’ll soon release MyLogin single sign-on functionality (SSO), which will make login easier for teachers, for schools who use it/Wonde
  • Fixing a bug which meant that event and club Booking Opens dates/times were not adjusting for international schools’ timezones
  • We’ll make it even easier to add students to a parents’ evening by class code, custom group, year group or similar via the Edit the Students page
  • We’ll build a bigger, better, more functional Attendance section, which will be a big help for managing both in-person and video parents’ evenings live / on the day
  • We’ll build a graphical interface that shows teacher availability in a really intuitive way
  • A waiting list that allows parents to notify the teacher if they couldn’t book them but wanted to see them.
  • We’ll build a new page in the parents area called “My Bookings” which summarizes all of the events/clubs a parent has booked, bought or subscribed their child(ren) to
  • We’re currently implementing a Microsoft Office365 / oAuth 2.0 single sign-on (SSO) login for teachers
  • We’ll also expand our new ‘Unsubscribe’/RSVP functionality so that it collects more information about why a parent will not attend.

Separately, Twilio, our video meeting technology partner, have announced that they will be depreciating their programmable video meeting technology by the end of 2024 and are replacing it with Zoom’s SDK technology. Migrating to this technology and gracefully releasing it for all customers will become a significant development project this year.

In addition to all of the above which we hope to release mostly in Q1 of 2024, but certain by summer 2024, we have a roadmap containing around 100 other tasks. However, if you want us to add a feature which you don’t see here, send us an email about it.

Updated Guides: These are the latest versions of our PDF guides:

Read More

Admin user SSO login from Firefly

By Software Updates

Helpful news: Admin users you create in Parents Booking can now login from Firefly using the Apps > Bookings button (see screenshot 3 below) in their staff Firefly web pages.

This will mean that as well as parents/carers and teachers, Admin users will also be able to login without the need for separate username and password credentials.

In order to set this up, simply create Admin accounts in Parents Booking for all users who require these, using steps 1 and 2 below. This is important, because otherwise Parents Booking will not know to let these users login as an Admin.

In the unusual cases where a staff member has both a teacher account and an Admin login, Parents Booking will preference logging them in as an Admin, but they can go to the Teachers page and press ‘Login As’ next to their teacher account to access it.

1. Login as an Admin user and go to Set Up School > expand the School Usernames and Passwords section and click the “Add/Manage Additional Admin Users’ link

2. Use the ‘Add Admin’ button to create additional Admin user accounts for staff who need access to the Admin Area. It is important their email address matches what is saved for their staff account in Firefly.

3. Test by asking other Admins to click the Apps > Bookings button in Firefly. This should log them in to their new Parents Booking admin account.

Scheduled Downtime: Fri 28th-Sun 30th July 2023

By Software Updates

Parents Booking intends to undertake essential maintenance over the next 2.5 days. This will cause scheduled ‘downtime’, but is being timed intentionally, because these should among be the quietest three days of the calendar year, but we do apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This downtime – which we expect will begin after midday on Friday 28th July (BST / UK timezone) – is essential because it will enable us to migrate all customers to a more modern database technology, one which is essential due to the growth of Parents Booking and to ensure its robustness and uptime standards are of the very highest standard.

During downtime, no users (parents, teachers, admins or Parents Booking staff) will be able to login to or use Parents Booking. A message will be shown on all Parents Booking pages explaining about the downtime, and this webpage will also direct those who want more detail to our Uptime Status webpage, which will offer a more up-to-date status check as our developers, server and database admins progress.

Please contact support@parents-booking.com if you believe this downtime will cause you any problems, or you need help downloading/printing reports or attendance lists before the downtime begins on Friday.

Thanks for your support.

Summer 2023 Software Updates

By Software Updates
Hello and welcome to the Summer Software Update for Parents Booking 😊

New Features:

Wraparound Care: Our newest module – Wraparound Care – allows schools to take bookings for clubs which are likely to have a different attendance every day, perhaps because they’re either a breakfast club or after-school club that helps parents drop off or pick up students earlier/later than the school’s usual opening times.
For more information, read this blog post.
Because this module is brand new, feedback and feature requests are very welcome. Send those to us here.

Ask questions when parents book events/clubs: Schools can now ask Yes/No questions, and optionally collect text answers, when parents are booking Events and Clubs. Simply add these when you create or edit an event/club, so whether you need to know if a student needs a bus, or whether a parent has agreed to the Terms and Conditions of booking, or ask which allergies students have, this can be easily asked and parents will have to answer in order to book. All answers are provided as part of the List of Bookings in the admin area.

Export imported teacher/class data: Have you ever wanted to export a simple-to-read Excel spreadsheet of all the class lists Parents Booking has imported? Now you can. The helpful “Export to Excel” feature on the Teachers shows all the students ‘connected’ to teachers.

Send bulk-reminders to parents – per date: Previously, when you wanted to email all parents a reminder of their appointment, but your parents’ evening had multiple dates, you could not select to only send a specific day’s reminders. Now you can. Go into Dashboard > Options > Print, Email and View Teacher Schedules and click “Email Appointment Reminder to All Parents” and if your parents’ evening has multiple days you can send this for All, or tick the dates you want to send this for.

Post hyperlinks to external booking links/websites on the parents’ Parents Booking pages: Schools who want to list their external booking pages for events/clubs that are booked outside of Parents Booking can now do so by creating an event or club and ticking the box to make this an externally listed item. Just paste in the booking link and this will be shown to parents among your other events and clubs when they login.

Choose which term to replicate events/clubs in: When you replicate an event or club, we’ll now ask which term you want this in. That helps you copy events or clubs from last term much more easily.

Updated Guides: These are the latest versions of our PDF guides:

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Set up your Payment Gateway

By Software Updates

If you want to take payments online for tickets, places, events, clubs, trips or similar booking made through Parents Booking, you need to:

  1. Set a price when you make (or edit) your event/clubs/wraparound and turn the “Do parents need to pay online when they book?” setting to Yes before saving the event, club or wraparound.
  2. Make sure that you have chosen and set up your preferred Payment Gateway on the ‘Set up School’ page.

Setting up your Payment Gateway:

On the ‘Set Up School’ page in Parents Booking’s admin area is a section called Payment Gateway Settings.

In this section, you will need to choose which of Parents Booking’s payment integrations you want to take payments through. PayPal, Stripe and ParentPay are some of the most common options schools want to use. When you select on, you can download instructions which explain how to link your Parents Booking account to whichever of the Payment Gateways you have chosen.

For example, if your school already uses ParentPay, the instructions offered will explain how to take some codes from your ParentPay account and paste them into Parents Booking. Parents/carers who book tickets, places or similar and are required to pay online will then be taken to ParentPay, to pay, and the funds will be sent to the school’s ParentPay account. The same is true for all Payment Gateways.

Parents Booking does not process the payments itself. Parents/carers are always sent to the school’s preferred Payment Gateway to pay, and then brought back to Parents Booking for their tickets/confirmation, provided payment has been made. This way Parents Booking ‘plugs into’ the payment system schools already use, or can set up for free through PayPal or Stripe.

If you have any questions about this topic, please contact our Support Team.

Ticking the ‘Order’ field in RM Integris Datashare for Parents Booking

By Software Updates

We would like you to go to RM Integris Datashare and ‘approve’ a field which will show you, in Parents Booking, which parent is the Main Contact when you go to invite parents to parents’ evenings, events, clubs, etc.

Step 1:

Go to Integris > Modules > System Management > RM Integris Datashare

Step 2:

Once inside the RM Integris Datashare, scroll through the different apps until you find Parents Booking. Click this “tile”.

Step 3:

Next, once you have clicked on Parents Booking’s tile, please click the blue “Information about the student’s contacts” section…

Step 4:

Lastly, we want you to tick the Order field. To do this you will need to click “Edit” in the very bottom right corner, and then tick Order, and then press Save in the bottom right corner.

Well done!

Now you’re finished, and if you run a data upload any time from now on (although there will be a 15min delay in this data importing possibly) you should find that Parents Booking’s ‘Invite’ pages show which parent is the Main Contact now.

Winter 2022 Software Updates

By Software Updates
Hello and Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for all your support of Parents Booking in 2022. As we finished 2022, we looked back on a year which has seen millions of parents and teachers connect due to appointments made, either for in-person or video meetings, through Parents Booking. We’re extremely proud of that and excited by all the opportunity to help schools that 2023 brings.

We’re immensely proud of our part in each customer (school)’s success, and we’re committed to continually improving Parents Booking, to help lower parent barriers to access appointments and conversations with teachers, and to make setting up parents’ evenings, events, clubs, trip, interviews and more as simply as possible.

We have been busy, as usual, and the below list is a showcase of new features added over the last few months:

New Features:

Cards on the table, this isn’t new new – it was added over summer, but we wanted to keep it on your radar because from what we have seen across thousands of parents’ evenings, schools who went from video meetings back to in-person meetings are seeing a drop-off in their attendances:
We are certain Hybrid parents’ evenings are the best way to achieve the highest attendance possible.
Schools who pay for the video module can now set up Hybrid meetings. Just create a different block of time for each “session” and decide which are video sessions and which are in-person. The video to the right explains more about this great new functionality, and there’s a great guide here too.

New for March 2023: Wraparound Care
This is so new that we are looking for ‘early adopters’ to test it in the knowledge that it is very much ‘version 1’ and might not have all the required bells and whistles, but feedback and feature requests are very welcome. Send those here.
You can now set up wraparound care booking, which is to say breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and similar where the attendance is expected to be different each date. For more information, read this blog post.

Google single sign-on (SSO) for parents. Schools can now toggle on/off the ability for parents to login to their school’s Parents Booking using a Google button that will appear on their parents’ login page. Much like how you have no doubt used Facebook, Google or other ‘single sign-on’ buttons to login to other websites, this should make logging in even easier for parents who have a Google/Gmail email or linked email in Parents Booking.
[Watch 1min demo video here]

Rather than turn this on automatically, it is currently ‘off’ for all schools. To turn this feature on, please go to Set Up School > Preferences and tick “Allow parents to login via Google single sign-on?”

Google single sign-on (SSO) for teachers. More news on the Google SSO front: On our login pages, teachers can now click the “Sign in with Google” button to login to their Parents Booking account, but obviously only where the school has set up the school’s emails with Google accounts, or uses Google to manage their emails. We will be adding a similar Login via Microsoft single sign-on option for teachers soon too.

Two-factor authentication for school Admin users. Schools can now toggle on/off the requirement for Admin users to verify their login using an two-factor authentication SMS/text. So, similar to when your bank asks you to verify the device you are using, and you are who you say you are, Parents Booking can ask Admin users to do the same. Set this up in the Preferences page, and define the mobile number for Admin users in the Usernames and Passwords section of the Set Up School page in the Admin area.
[Watch 1min demo video here]

Rather than turn this on automatically, it is currently ‘off’ for all schools. To turn this feature on, please go to Set Up School > Preferences and tick “Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) for Admin logins?”

Schools can now create more Admin users. In the school’s ‘Set Up School’ page, in the Admin area, you can now click “Add/Manage Additional Admin Users” in the Usernames and Passwords section, and use this to create more Admin users. Simply create an Admin, and they will be emailed with a link to create their own password. Also, if you input their mobile number, they will also be asked for a 2FA code when they login (if you have turned this feature on, as per the above update).

Parents can RSVP ‘no’ to invites and reminders. Parents will now receive a type of unsubscribe link in their invites and reminder emails which allow them to RSVP ‘no’ to the parents’ evening. This helps make sure they are not reminded again unnecessarily, and will show the school this feedback detailing why some parents have not booked. We will go on to expand this functionality to include parental comments and include these stats in the evening stats in the next version/software update.

You can now hide the “In-Person” / “Video Call text which is shown on the parent and admin/teacher booking pages. We had added this text to help schools display whether a parents’ evening is in-person, by video, or where it’s a mix of both, which session is which. However, some schools didn’t want this text to display, e.g. where they were using Zoom or Google Meet but our pages were saying “In-person”, so a tick box called “Hide “In-Person” / “Video Call” text on booking pages” in Set Up School > Preferences will now let you hide this text if wanted.

Pie charts in Reports section. We plan to show more and more of these, with one great forthcoming new feature being that an Admin can use the pie charts to watch how successful the live video/hybrid parents’ evenings’ attendance is, but, for now, in version 1, pie charts will offer a graphical interpretation of booking data on the Dashboard > Options > Check Stats page, and when you use the Reports pages to check on parents’ evenings which have not taken place yet. You’ll be able to easily see the proportion of parents who have and have not booked, for example.

24hr or 12hr clocks: In some parts of the world the 12hr clock is preferred, so you can now go to the Preferences page and toggle between these two time displays for all parent, teacher and admin views.

Updated Guides: Over the summer we also significantly updated these important guides to reflect lots of new functionality added to Parents Booking over the last year:

 

Read More

Re-arranging your parents’ evening

By News and Info

If you need to re-arrange your parents’ evening, you can do this easily by following the below steps:

  • Go to Dashboard > Options > Edit the Evening (or Evenings > [Group Name] > Edit)
  • Change the date(s), and also consider changing the booking deadline date/time
  • Before you save these changes, you might want to tick the box below the Reg Classes, at the bottom of the page, which asks if you want to add a custom message to the parents’ confirmation emails. If you add a message explaining the rearrangement, this will appear in the email sent to parents detailed in the step 5.
  • Now save the parents’ evening, and all bookings will be kept in place but the date will have been updated.
  • We would now advise sending parents an updated confirmation email of their appointments, so to do this go to Dashboard > Options > Print, Email and View Teacher Schedules. On this page, click the 4th button on the 2nd row, which sends parents their appointment reminder. This will show the new date of parents’ evenings, along with the message you added in  part 3 above.
  • At the same time, you can click the button on this same web page to email all teachers their appointment schedules again, if wanted.

Summer 2022 Updates

By Software Updates

Hello and welcome back!

We hope you had a really refreshing summer, and if possible that you found yourself sipping a piña colada on a beach somewhere!

While you were away, we were busy adding more features to help you make this the best year of parents’ evenings yet.

Here’s a quick summary:

We are certain Hybrid parents’ evenings are the best way to achieve the highest attendance possible. Schools who pay for the video module can now set up Hybrid meetings. Just create a different block of time for each “session” and decide which are video sessions and which are in-person. The video to the right explains more about this great new functionality, and there’s a great guide here too.

Free trial of our basic Events and Clubs module through to 1st January 2023. This module usually costs an additional 25p per student, per year, but we wanted all schools (who don’t currently pay for the premium version of this module) to have the benefit of the basic Events and Clubs module, to help them set up events, clubs and their Christmas performances. Read more about how it works here: https://parents-booking.com/events-and-clubs

Custom Groups: If your school sets up and uses ‘Custom Groups’ in its MIS database, you can import these using our Wonde integration (and we’ll add this functionality to other integrations soon).
More info on how to import and use Custom Groups here: https://knowledge.parents-booking.com/importing-and-using-custom-groups/

Parents can RSVP ‘no’ to invites and reminders. Parents will now receive a type of unsubscribe link in their invites and reminder emails which allow them to RSVP ‘no’ to the parents’ evening. This helps make sure they are not reminded again unnecessarily, and will show the school data on why some parents have not booked. We will go on to expand this functionality to include comments and include in the evening stats in the next version/software update.

Teachers can now toggle between their schools. If a teacher works at multiple schools, they can now toggle between those schools without having to log out and back in, providing their accounts use the same email/login information.

Teacher First Name or Initial? Schools who import their data via Wonde can now choose whether to show the the teacher’s forename or initial to parents. This was important for some schools, who wanted to show an Initial rather than Forename. Change this by going to Set Up School > Preferences page.

Updated Guides: We have also significantly updated these important guides to reflect lots of new functionality added to Parents Booking over the last year.