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ClassJuggler Version 7.1 Released

We are happy to announce the release of version 7.1.0 of ClassJuggler, which went live late last night while you slept.

And this one’s a whopper: It includes two highly anticipated new features, both requested by you, our customers:

The “Future Drop Dates ” feature
The “Customer Portal Access Rules” feature

Details on these below. But the new version also includes more than 30 enhancements to existing features plus a variety of bug fixes.

Future Drop Dates feature

This exciting new Future Drop Dates feature frees you up from having to worry about remembering to drop a student from a class at a later date.

Example use: Let’s say that a student is dropping at the end of the month or a parent tells you their child student will be out for the month of July – in fact any time a customer requests to be dropped from a class in the near future. In the past, you’d have to jot it down on a sticky note, or make a calendar reminder. No more! You can now go into ClassJuggler and schedule that change into the student’s account profile. Done!

Customer Portal Access Rules feature

The much requested Customer Portal Access Rules feature, or “Portal Codes” for short, is here! This feature gives you control over how your families interact with the Customer Portal.

You can now assign Portal Codes to control and restrict access to:

New customer registrations
Online shopping
Access to specific class stores
Preventing customers from signing into their accounts

…all unless they have the proper code, which you can privately give them.

Codes can also be set to be active only for a set period of time.

You can create and share codes with specific groups of customers for special enrollments (example – for a class that should only be available to advanced students), for early registrations, and for other special situations.

This article is just a summary of selected items from the full release. For the full scoop, log in and review the Home Base > Change Log and get complete details!

We’ll be updating the online help files soon to reflect these changes. Meanwhile, feel free to contact us with help in using these new tools.

Have you tried our communications tracker yet?

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If you are new to feature-rich ClassJuggler, here’s a cool tool you may not have discovered yet: The ClassJuggler Customer Communications Tracker.

The Customer Communications Tracker allows an administrator at your business to view, create, and manage customer communications or touch points for all of the activities related to a customer, whether generated in ClassJuggler or even elsewhere.

Much like expensive customer CRM software (customer relationship management), the ClassJuggler Customer Communications Tracker helps you see all of the touch points for each of your customers.

Tracking all communication with your customers can be important during a dispute, where a customer may claim they were never sent an account statement, late payment notice, or other reminder. Communication entries in ClassJuggler provide an audit trail. They are are retained by the system for 2 years from the date of entry.

We asked for our ClassJuggler users what they think of the Communications Tracker and how it has helped them run their business. They say great things!

Alicia Shurtlef, Owner of Kidz in Motion of Rhode Island is a ClassJuggler user for more than 6 years. She said, “I’m very excited about this feature. Sometimes forget whether or not I returned someone’s call or email. Sometimes it’s an easy process to figure out but usually when I question if I contacted a customer it’s because I have received multiple emails or calls that day. This will be a nice and easy one step way to verify if I did indeed get back to someone.”

Alyssa added, “I like that we can also add new tracks to keep organized. This will also help for those times that my emails are sometimes sent to some customers spams boxes. I will have proof that I actually sent it and won’t have to overload my email with past emails that will probably never be read again. It takes up a lot of space.”

Business owner Amy Forde of Let’s Dance school in South Carolina – a ClassJuggler user for more than 14 years! – Had this to say about the tracker: “The communication tracker has helped me prove to a costumer that they are getting all of the emails I send rather than ‘only some’ that they claim. It’s very helpful!”

We also heard from Christina Jodoin, an Admin with Jungle Bus Gymnastics, FL and a ClassJuggler user for 2 years. She said this: “The communication tracker has highly benefited the Jungle Bus Gymnastics. We are able to see what and when we sent each customers. It is very detailed and we are even able to input certain information for our records. It has kept our customers more detailed with information and are able to explain each correspondence to each of our customers. Thank you again for providing this service to us.”

The Customer Communications Tracker tool is available in all our ClassJuggler products, including:

Ready For Taxes? How ClassJuggler Can Help!

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Use our financial reports to get the information you need

When you run a business, time is money, and the time you spend preparing to file your annual taxes can be frustrating, even if necessary.

Fortunately, ClassJuggler software for class-based businesses is loaded with reports for just about every aspect of your school or other class-based business.

With U.S. tax day fast approaching, here are…

The 4 most important reports for tax preparation

Whether for tax preparation or for monthly bookkeeping, you definitely want to check out ClassJuggler’s…

Customer Payments report
Customer Applied Payments report
Deposit Summary report
Company Billing report

Here’s where you can find these forms within ClassJuggler:

How you do your accounting (cash-based vs. accrual-based) factors in to which of these ClassJuggler financial reports will benefit you most in your bookkeeping and especially at tax time.

Here are some tips and details on these reports.

Deposit Summary report – [for CASH accounting]

This report can show you summarized information about payments received, organized by type, for any period of time. This is ideal for reconciling your checkbook and your merchant account activity and deposits.

Customer Payments – [for CASH accounting]

This report can show you all of the income you are receiving daily, weekly, monthly, or for any period of time you choose. The report will total payments in a variety of ways you choose to make reconciliation and deposit reporting simple.

Customer Applied Payments – [for CASH accounting]

This special report links payments received to the charges they were applied to, and can tell you exactly how much was earned by a particular charge account or by account category. It will only show applied amounts, so if a customer has a credit balance remaining, those amounts will not yet be factored in.

=EXAMPLE=

Let’s say you posted $1,000.00 in tuition and $200.00 in merchandise in the month you are running the report on, and you received $1,300.00 in payments for the same period; only the $1,200.00 applied to charges will be considered “earned,” leaving $100 unapplied.

Company Billing – [for ACCRUAL accounting]

the Company Billing report provides you with a list of charges your company has posted in a particular period of time. Since this is only showing what you have posted in charges, and not what has been paid or not paid by your customers, this is the go-to report for businesses that use accrual-based accounting for their bookkeeping.

=EXAMPLE=
Let’s say you posted $1,000.00 in tuition and $200.00 in merchandise during the month in which you are now running the Company Billing report; this report would return $1,200.00 total in products and services billed out to your customers.

For more information on these reports and examples and instructions for running them, please refer to “Online Help Manual” found in the green Help & Links Menu found at the bottom left of every screen in ClassJuggler. Or, as you already know if you are an existing customer, give ClassJuggler support a call if what you find in the online help leaves you with any questions about running these reports, and we can walk you through it step-by-step.

Another ClassJuggler Upgrade – Always Improving!

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With the release today of ClassJuggler v7.0.2 – which, as always, happens automatically for you (one of the big advantages of using an online service for your class-based business management software) — you, our customers, can expect to see many subtle but helpful changes.

Brand-new features in ClassJuggler

Bounce Back

Bounce Back is a new feature that allows you to navigate away from certain screens in ClassJuggler to do actions related to a given workflow or set of steps and then easily “bounce back” to where you were prior to taking that action.

What it will look like: A new Bounce Back button will appear on those related screens. Clicking the Bounce Back button teleports you all the way back to what you were doing before you started this offshoot action, automatically saving any changes or options/selections you made.

Over time, we will likely add the Bounce Back buttons in many places. Initially, you will see the feature from a Customer Portal order to a customer’s account, or to sending a confirmation statement to the customer, and then return back to the original order.

Batch Payment Processing

Where: Billing > Customer Payments: Batch Payment Processing

We mentioned this in our last release. Now, it will be available to all clients.

What you will see: You’ll see a new batch payment option on the Batch Payment Processing screen, which will give you much greater control over what types of transactions you will collect payments for when processing batch payments.

There are now two batch action buttons, instead of one:

Process Customers – FULL BALANCES (the original way)
Process Customers – SELECTED CHARGE ACCOUNTS (the new option)

Clicking the new SELECTED CHARGE ACCOUNTS button takes you to an intermediary screen where you select one or more accounts to include in the batch payment run.

if on this intermediary screen you select to, say, only collect on the charge accounts for “Tuition” and “Competition Fee,” only those types of charges would be paid.

Example: Let’s say, in this scenario, that a customer has a balance due of $400.00. This includes $100 in tuition, $40 for registration fees, $60 for merchandise, and $200 for competition fees. After running the batch payment collection, this customer’s credit card would only be billed for $300 –- the $100 in tuition and $200 in competitions fees on their account. The remaining charges on their account would stay unpaid.

Changes and Enhancements

Many existing features in ClassJuggler have been modified or improved. These include:

- Customer Portal: Customer Policies – Added a second tab to the Customer Policies screen for viewing archived policies.
- Customer > Maintenance Page 1 – The “auto-balance” feature has been removed.
  Customer > Maintenance Page 2 – The section displaying Policies & Agreements has been modified with tabs to allow viewing of only current or archived policies.
- Customer > Transactions – Created a quick link to the Pre-Pay Billing screen from the Help and Tips Menu. The current customer will be selected when arriving at the pre-pay billing screen.
- Student > Maintenance Page 2 – The section displaying Policies & Agreements has been modified with tabs to allow viewing of current or archived policies.
- Events > Event Template Maintenance – Added more information to the description of policies when they are added to an event.
- Billing > Auto-Balance Manager – This no-longer-needed feature has been removed.
- Reports > Customer > Policies and Agreements – Report updated to allow for reporting on both current and archived policies. The policy selector now contains two sections for selecting current or archived policies. The selector also now notes the policy title, who it applies to, if mandatory or optional, and the ID# of the policy.
- Tools > Customer Portal Orders: Pending Orders – The way orders are processed and reviewed now is much easier to see incoming pending orders by the customer (family) placing the order. This allows you to process an entire order as a unit rather than in bits and pieces as it was done in the past. Other new features on the pending orders includes special customer actions with the new “Bounce Back” feature.
- Tools > Customer Portal Orders: Historical Orders – The new Historical Orders screen make it much easier to review historical orders by the customer (family) who placed the order, now showing color-coded statistics about the order and which class requests were approved, wait listed, or canceled. Other new features on historical orders includes special customer actions with the new “Bounce Back” feature.
- Tools > Customer Portal Orders: Items In Shopping Carts – The presentation of items in shopping carts (not checked out) has also been updated, now linking to a customer record, and shows a selected class as the item.
- Tools > Web Site Tools > Shopping Cart Manager > Pending Classes > Enroll in Class – We improved the way pending orders are compared for priority when processing an order.
- Preferences > Policies – The copy of the Policies screen has been improved, and now shows how a policy is used throughout ClassJuggler. The ID of the policy is also displayed for easier identification of a policy.
- Preferences > Advanced Settings – Removed the option for customer defaults to be auto-balance, as it is no longer needed in the current version.

Several other minor bugs were fixed.

This new version affects all customers using any of the following:

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

Survey: Administrative Tasks Costing Your Business!

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Thank you all for your generous participation in our two-question survey we asked of class-based businesses. Your answers were revealing!

The primary take away from the survey results is this: Your class-based businesses spend on average more than 35 hours a month on administrative tasks related to registering customers, creating student files, signing students up for class, and handling customer payments for fees.

That’s a lot of extra time spent that we are willing to bet was not part of your vision when you started your dance, gymnastics, cheer, swim, music, martial arts, or K-12 school – or at least not the thing that motivated you to start your business, and CERTAINLY not the part that you look forward to.

Best practices for reducing all that administrivia

No doubt you would rather spend more time working with your students, guiding them as they hone their craft and develop character. Good news is, the survey also showed that there are ways to reduce all those administrative tasks by literally half – which will also save your business a great deal of money, while allowing you to focus on the reason you got in the business.

It turns out that, on average, ClassJuggler’s customers report that using our software for class-based businesses has cut their administrative tasks on average by 35 percent, with nearly 20 percent of survey respondents seeing administrative tasks cut more than half!

If you feel your school could use a break from the quagmire of administrivia, give us a call and we will take a look at your current administration practices to identify the ways that ClassJuggler’s school software can create efficiencies; with some of its most applicable time-saving tools. We’d be happy to walk you through some of them!

Winter Storm-Related Outage? Business Text to the Rescue!

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A common scenario every winter: a sudden dump of snow makes roads impassable or dangerous. Or a sudden temperature drop during a rainstorm ices over the roads to your school or other class-based business. You need to get the word out FAST that one or several classes are canceled or delayed. But how?

There’s an easy way: ClassJuggler’s built-in texting tool! This highly customizable tool makes it easy to get timely SMS (text) messages to all or a subset of your customers. And you can filter your text message recipient list by certain attributes so that it only goes to the right audience for your message.

For example, you can specify that your closure message be delivered only to:

Students or parents of a specific class – like, say, the one class that will be affected
Classes the meet on a certain day or date, particularly helpful when you know that all classes will be canceled because of the weather event

It’s important to pinpoint your audience not only because it makes your messages more likely to be appreciated but because the mobile device owners for whom that message is not important (such as those who don’t have classes the week of your cancellation) may get frustrated enough to block their phone from receiving messages from you.

How to filter your text message to a specific audience within ClassJuggler

For example, let’s say you want to target your text message to only parents whose children attend a certain class. Simply select the class you want to work with, then choose Send Class SMS Text from the Class menu, as shown below:

Learn more about the ClassJuggler SMS Messaging tool:

If you’re a customer, take our next SMS Messaging webinar when one is scheduled. Or you can simply find it within ClassJuggler after you log in right here:

You can also use our robust ClassJuggler Help to learn all about SMS Messaging.

And here’s some extra good news; while some of our competitors charge per message for their clients to use their messaging tool, the SMS messaging tool is totally free to ClassJuggler customers, no matter how many students you have.

But wait – I’m not a ClassJuggler client yet!

Learn about how our ClassJuggler products can help your school to run efficiently:

Or simply contact us directly and we can answer your questions.

Save tons of personnel hours at your class-based school

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The stats are in; class-based businesses spend on average more than 35 hours a month on administrative tasks related to registering customers, creating student files, signing students up for class, and handling customer payments for fees. This video shows you how to cut those admin costs in half by letting customers do these things all by themselves:

The new Customer Portal from ClassJuggler can change the way you do business, and change the way your customers view you! Learn more.