Category Archives: Product Info

Add a Customer Portal to Your School’s Website

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What’s the best way to get more time as aimage school/class-based owner and boost your profit margin? Simple: Let your customers self-manage their relationship with you from the convenience of your website!

Our powerful Customer Portal tool lets your customers view and update their personal information, view their billing history, shop for classes, make payments, manage student data, view class enrollments, and much more – all with a few clicks or swipes!

The most modern, mobile-optimized, Parent Portal on the market!

Your customers choose a mobile device over a traditional computer 60% of the time, so a completely mobile-friendly and mobile-responsive registration site is a must! Our Customer Portal looks fabulous on every device and is super easy to use, from desktops to the smallest smartphone screen – with no pinching and zooming.

Customizable interface!

While your website’s Parent Portal pages sit on our servers, your customers will never know it, because you can easily match your imageClassJuggler portal pages to your website’s look and feel. For example:

Offer your customers online class enrollment and online class shopping

Forget about expensive and time-consuming mailers; let customers:

  • Easily browse your class catalogue in their jammies — from the comfort of their home.
  • Filter class views by day, time, instructor, location, etc..
  • Add selected classes to a shopping cart.
  • Choose optional or required class fees, late fees, and more.

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Use our affordable credit card processing add-on service with the Customer Portal to let customers pay online for classes with a mobile device tap or computer mouse click using their credit or debit card, assuring you receive payments on time. No more waiting for a customer’s hand-delivered or mailed-in check!

Ease your burden with self-serve customer accounts

Chop your administrative tasks in half or more by giving your customers control of their own records! With the Customer Portal, your customers can:

  • Self-register, creating a new account for themselves without you lifting a finger. A step-by-step wizard makes self-registration a breeze!
  • Set up and manage an on-file credit or debit card to allow for convenient one-click payments or ongoing payment schedules.

Since your customer’s information is available to them online at any time, you no longer need to print out or send out confirmation mailings, payment receipts, invoices, or statements. What a time and money saver!

See our parent walkthrough video to see the Customer Portal in action.

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Powerful reporting tools help you understand your business

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ClassJuggler’s reporting tools make it drop-dead easy to put key business metrics in your grasp with just a few mouse clicks, such customer, student, instructor, and class data. This kind of critical at-a-glance information can save you hours of manual reporting work and reduce business risk by identifying gaps or problems. reports

In ClassJuggler, you can track, sort, and filter all records by dozens of fields, including creation date, category, account, name, day and time, class capacity, and much more.

As well, you can easily generate dozens of professional reports, which you can view online, print as PDF, or export as a .CSV file.

Here are some of the more popular reports:

Class reports

  • Attendance reports
  • blank attendance sheets for in-class use as printouts
  • Skill sheets
  • Class enrollee reports
  • Class schedule reports
  • Classroom schedules

With each, you can limit reports by day or class times, enrollees, drops, or class type.

Student and customer reports

  • Bad address reports
  • Missing information reports
  • Student lists by status or group
  • Student registration, pre-registration, and non-registration reports

Results for each report type are linked to student and customer records for fast updating.

Instructor reports

You can run reports on instructors by assigned active classes or in-progress classes, or by other key data, such as students assigned, student scoring records, and more.

Financial Reports

  • Report on customer account balances (by last invoiced amount due or current net total balance due).
  • Create detailed customer payment reports by payment type, in either cash basis or accrual basis.
  • Add detailed account categories to your billing reports to view at the detail level or roll-up the totals to the highest level accounts.

If you’re a ClassJuggler client, already managing your school with our software, you can get detailed information about the many reports you can run, and how to do so, here in our help files.

Enjoy security and control access your way!

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When you’re running a business, nothing is more important than the safety and control of your data. With ClassJuggler’s software for schools and studios, we respect that! We protect your school’s data from improper access, from corruption, viruses, and more. We also give you powerful administrative controls to define system access.

Your school’s data is safe with us

ClassJuggler protects your records using the same data encryption used by Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Dean and Deluca, and other major online merchants.

Sophisticated user security controls are in your hands

Our Advanced User Security system gives you complete control over what access you want to allow or disallow to each of your administrative users.

Set custom user roles

Easily create custom “roles” in ClassJuggler that limit what screens and reports users can access.

For example:

  • Create an instructor role, limited to managing attendance, skills, and class enrollment.
  • Create a bookkeeper role, providing but limiting access to financial screens and reports.
  • Or set up a receptionist role with view-only access.

Control access to specific details

ClassJuggler also lets you create role access rules, such as specifying add, update, delete, or view permissions.

For example, you can limit your employees’ access to a customer’s credit card account information while allowing contact information access.

Specify permitted computers

This unique security feature lets you control/limit access to your ClassJuggler administration from a designated computer, or on designated days and times.

The ClassJuggler security system has over 90 specific privileges, each with four individual access levels. And we’re adding more privileges all the time.

Already a ClassJuggler user? Then find specific instructions for configuring your school’s security profiles here:

Not yet using ClassJuggler’s school or studio business management software for your business? Learn more about ClassJuggler at:

Save time with our mailing labels generator

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Here’s yet another cool tool built into ClassJuggler – the mailing labels generator!

ClassJuggler automates formerly difficult labeling tasks by pulling data from customer and student records. Making mailing labels has never been this easy! Included features:

  • Select from more than 20 pre-defined Avery labels.
  • Customize font, font styles, sizes, and many other layout options.
  • Save settings for each label type for unlimited variations on regular mailings.
  • Filter mailing label generation by customer statuses and types, such as balance due status, enrolled classes, student categories, and more.
  • Generate return address labels for your business.

Already a ClassJuggler customer? Here’s the step-by-step instructions to do mailing labels:

Not yet using ClassJuggler’s school or studio business management software for your business? Learn more:

Merchant Processing 101

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Understanding how to accept credit/debit cards in your business

Merchant processing and the software and network providers that make it all work is a complicated topic. As a school/studio owner, you simply don’t need to know all the mumbo-jumbo mechanics of merchant processing.

You are busy enough teaching classes and running your business! So we simplify the basics right here, outlining the steps you’ll take to process a credit card payment from a customer. And if you want to simplify getting set up with merchant processing even more, contact us – we can help!

The basics

Generally, people say “merchant account” when they are talking about credit card processing. But normally, there are 3 pieces involved in merchant processing that give you the ability to take a payment from your customers:

  • The Front End – The person making the payment
  • The Middle – The gateway that is authorizing and verifying the payment
  • The Back End – Your merchant bank who moves the money into your account

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These three pieces are not necessarily things you have to purchase or manage individually. Think of them as one virtual process that is mostly invisible to you. But let’s look at each.

The Front End

At the front of every transaction you or the customer directly begin the transaction when processing a payment. The job of the front-end is to capture all of the important information about a transaction so it can be sent electronically for processing.

The front-end can be any of the following:

A physical retail card terminal – where you swipe or insert a chip card for payment. Just like the ones you see at the grocer or a card reader at a gas pump. These are not common for dance studios unless the studio is doing a lot of retail sales.

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A virtual terminal – This is simple software, usually found aqs a form on a Web site, that you fill out with all of the details of a payment for a customer to process a single payment. These, too, are rarely used by a studio/school.

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A fully integrated software frontend like ClassJuggler, which allows for additional features such as customer account history, secure card storage, recurring batch payment processing, emailed receipts, and more. This method provides the most value, time savings, and features.

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The Middle

Sitting in the middle of all transactions is the gateway. An example of a gateway company is Visa’s Authorize.Net. The gateway’s job is to validate every transaction you or your customers process.

The gateway takes the information from the frontend and then contacts the issuing bank of the customer’s credit or debit card and validates a number of important things:

  1. · Address verification
  2. · Checking to see if the card is still active and valid
  3. · Checking expiration date
  4. · Making sure the cardholder has sufficient funds to cover the payment.

The gateway then tells the front-end whether or not the transaction succeeded or failed.

All successful transactions are then held as “pending” by the gateway until the end of the day when all the transactions are “captured” and then batched together and sent to the back-end processor for funding.

The backend

The backend merchant bank or processor is a three-fold job:

  1. The backend bank/processor takes the batch file from the gateway and deposits the funds you have collected each day into your bank account.
  2. The backend processor calculates all of the fees associated with each transaction, and then typically deducts those fees daily, or at the end of each month, for the entire month’s processing.
  3. Finally, the merchant bank provides you with either a printed or online statement showing all activity and fees from your account each month.

If you’re a ClassJuggler customer, you can bring your own merchant processor or use our merchant processing service. Going through us will greatly streamline the process, at a well-negotiated processing service rate, and syncs up with your client data within ClassJuggler.  Find out more about our merchant processing tools here.

Texting for Businesses

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If you are a business, it’s important to be able to get messages quickly to your customers. For example:

  • When weather forces a class cancellation
  • To send a reminder for performers regarding which costume they need for today’s appointment
  • To make a last-minute schedule change
    Texting can be an ideal way to do this. It’s something that many business text-hand - LOWsoftware services, such as ClassJuggler, enable business owners or managers to do.

But doing it right –  using smart business  practices  for texting –  can be extremely important to make sure that the recipient  doesn’t tag your text messages as spam, which may result in the recipient or the recipient’s mobile carrier blocking all future messages you send that person. To prevent getting tagged by a customer or mobile carrier as spam, follow these…

Business Texting Best Practices

  1. Don’t include a dollar sign ($49) or percentage sign (15% off) or other finance related marketing language, such as, “Purchase today!” Doing so can get your text message blocked by the mobile carrier as marketing spam mail. Avoid using the phrase free, sale, or buy.
  2. Generally avoid using the text messaging service for marketing purposes at all. Certain government organizations have laws against using text messaging for marketing in order to protect consumers.
  3. Instead, consider texting customers as a great way to send important and timely messages to an individual or group of individuals To help with this, ClassJuggler’s texting feature allows you to filter your recipient list by class, parents versus students, date of class, and many other factors, so you can limit text messages to just those who really need to receive it.
  4. Go easy on the frequency of messages you send out. In today’s busy world, you can quickly annoy your customers by bombarding their phone with messages, which could motivate them to block your messages altogether.
  5. Also to avoid annoying customers, who may be in the middle of other important business, make sure the content of what you’re sending is actually relevant and timely to them. If it isn’t both timely and relevant, it’s better to send messages by email.
  6. Don’t use the phrase “reply STOP”
  7. Make sure to get permission from your customer to send the messages this way. An easy way to do this in ClassJuggler is to include information about your intention to do so when parents are signing up in the Parent Portal to request classes or make payments online. They will pass through screens that require the parent to click a checkmark box indicating their agreement with whatever you have written.

Following these good business practices for SMS/texting will help ensure that your phone number is not blocked by an individual recipient or by the recipient’s mobile carrier.

Learn more about the SMS text messaging in ClassJuggler’s Help. The SMS text messaging features are available in the following ClassJuggler products:

Use the Registration Manager to mass-expire student registrations

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Do you have a specific Student group in which you want the registrations to all expire on the same day? Or maybe you want to manually expire all your registrations just before or after your summer sessions. Then it’s time to use your ClassJuggler Registration Manager tool, which allows you to easily mass-expire your student registrations. 

From your TOOLS menu select Registration Manager:

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From the Registration Manager screen, you can select a specific end date and a student group. Enter a registration cutoff end date and use the selector to select a group of students you wish to expire registrations.

ClassJuggler then displays the number of students that would be affected by the date you select. Clicking on the “Expire” button will then automatically expire all affected student registrations:

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The Registration Manager feature is available in all our school management software offerings, including:

Any questions remaining? Simply contact us and we can answer your questions or walk you through it.