April 2008 - Posts
Hey Blog readers!! If you enter advance deposits and payments separately, you're gonna love this tip. You can add advance deposits at the same time as payments!! This will not only save you time during advance deposit season (we'll make this a joyous event 
) but will streamline the process.
The first thing you need to do is make sure your Advance Deposit Business Rules are set to allow the creation of advance deposits from payments. Once this option is marked, you're ready to go advance deposit payment crazy!
Start with adding the payment using your normal process either through the deposit record or Records, Payments. After you enter the required info, go back to the Payment tab. Take a look at the options on the bottom of the tab; this is where you add the advance deposit.
The Advance Deposit IDs available in the drop-down are based on the payment date. If the payment date is outside the valid date range for the advance deposit it will not be available. Once you select the advance deposit ID, enter the amount and select the record to add the advance deposit, click Create Advance Deposit. This will open the Advance Deposit record. Enter any remaining appropriate info, save and close the advance deposit, and then click Save and New to move on to the next payment. It's that easy!!
If you would like to see step-by-step instructions, take a look at Knowledgebase solution BB230156. To read more about advance deposits check out the Records Guide for Student Billing.
Happy Advance Deposit season 
. Talk to you soon!
How much time do you spend creating new academic years, sessions, and courses every year? Hopefully not as much if you’re using all the great copy features in EE.
We recently received valuable feedback from a user who was copying academic years but didn’t know where to go for information about how to copy course information. Based on this excellent feedback, we made a change to the Records Guide for Registrar’s Office for EE. Now when you access the Records Guide, in the Courses chapter, you can find information in a new centralized section titled “Copying Course Records”.
After you create or copy an academic year or session, you may want to copy specific course information, such as:
- How to copy a course from an existing course record.
- How to globally copy course information from one academic year and session to another.
- How to copy course restrictions from one academic year and session to another.
- How to copy grading information on the course record from one academic year and session to another.
For more information about these time saving procedures, see:
To copy academic years and sessions, go to Configuration, Set up Registrar’s Office, Create academic years. If you copy an academic year, you can choose to copy course grades information, course restrictions, faculty/staff restrictions, room restrictions, and course billing.
For more information about how to copy academic years and sessions, see:
I really am one of those weird people who takes great satisfaction and pride in life just by helping others. I abhor being in the spotlight, the limelight, or any kind of light. 
I leave that to other people who enjoy the attention and are good at handling it. Instead, I would rather stay in the background waiting for my opportunity to do some good. I like facilitating someone else’s success. Somehow it means more to me that way.
And one very important part of being happy to help is also being happy to listen. Otherwise, how do you know how or when you’re needed? I admit I’m still working on my listening skills. I tend to get very animated and excited when talking to people and interrupt way too often.
But, how does this pertain to EE? Well it pertains because I wanted to inform you about an ongoing opportunity for you to give feedback to the Products Documentation Team about what you need, like, dislike, and anything else about our help content. If you have a few extra minutes (5 minutes tops, I promise!), take our online survey. We need your input to be able to help. Plus, as a bonus, on a quarterly basis we enter survey respondents into a drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. We not only are happy to listen we want to reward you for your time. And if you’re tired of surveys or don’t have five minutes, you can always send a quick comment via email 
. My ears are already tingling in anticipation.
Help me help you… (yes I couldn’t resist going there, sorry for the bad movie quote 
)
With the most recent release of
The Education Edge, I was excited about a new feature I worked extensively on –
Residence Life.
Residence Life is an optional module in
Registrar’s Office and
Admissions Office that enables you to enter housing and meal plan information for students. If you have
Student Billing, you can also set up charges for student’s residence life fees. For 7.75, I wrote a new user guide:
Education Edge Residence Life GuideIn writing a new guide, there is always a lot of planning trying to figure out how you might use the new features and what approach to the documentation will work best. Invariably every time I write a new guide I learn the most from our users when we get feedback. And we
love your feedback! I’m excited to see how I can edit and make improvements to something I developed from scratch. That being said, I wanted to share with you my favorite things about the new optional module
Residence Life. I’ll try to keep things as general as possible because each organization might have a different setup.
- From the Residence Life page, you can complete many tasks from one central location. For example, you can set up residence halls, residences, and meal plans. You can also enter residence life information in two different ways – by student or by residence in grid view. And, if you need an immediate report you can print a residence life report or a rooms list.
- Another great thing I love about Residence Life is that it works with another new 7.75 enhancement – hold codes! For example, you work in the housing office and have a student that owes housing fees for the current academic year. At your school, a student cannot be assigned for housing for the next academic year until her balance for the current year has been settled. Since you’ve already set up your hold codes in Config, you are ready to add a hold code to the student’s record to restrict her from signing up for her new room. Now she has incentive to get her payment in!
- And, because I appreciate being efficient with my time, I love the ability to copy residence life information from one academic year and session to another. If most of your students don’t change residences from one session to another, for example fall to spring, you can copy the information and then make tweaks where necessary. And if you’re the type of school that keeps your students in the same residence year and after year, think of all the time you’re saving!
Overall, I’m happy to work on such exciting developments for both products. Writing for
The Education Edge always keeps me on my toes with its new features. Just keep that feedback coming, we need your voice to keep our help great.
Hey blog readers! April is almost over and so is the billing year for many of you. This means time for advance deposits, promoting students, enrolling students, and running statements. Makes me tired just thinking about it 
. This may not be the way you would choose to spend a Saturday night, but it's a process that needs to be done. To help you, check out the special edition of Student Billing Statement: Student Billing 7 End-of-Year Process. It outlines common tasks for all organizations to assist with billing preparation, reporting, records management, and statements.
As you review and use the process list, let me know your thoughts. Do you find it helpful?
Talk to you later!
Hey blog readers. There’s a cool new feature in 7.75 called Application Restrictions I wanted to share with you today. I’ve spoken to several customers over the years frustrated that their advance deposit credits applied to all charges except tuition. The resolution? I hated to tell them they had to unapply each credit and then reapply them to the correct charge…manually. This process was not only time consuming, it took additional resources away from their daily tasks and caused statements to go out late.
I suppose that explains why I’m so happy this feature was added, as I hope you are 
.
Application Restrictions let you define the charges that payments, credits, and financial aid will apply. If you would like the steps to set up and use application restrictions, check out Knowledgebase solution BB217946.
Have any of you started using defining restrictions? What do you think?
Talk to you soon!
Help files?! User Guides?! Who are those mysterious people who work behind the scenes in product development trying to make geek speak easy? Well I do, for one. I’m The Education Edge product lead for the Documentation team. The Documentation team is composed of some great (albeit wacky at times) people who love software and love trying to explain it to others. Unlike most people at Blackbaud, we get to work on all the products. We see the bigger picture and try to help you get the most out of your software.
We create the help files embedded in your software (often found by pressing the F1 key) and the user guides found on our website. So that being said, what does a technical writer have to say on a blog? Well being a writer, I do usually have plenty to say, but I’ll try to bring you tips, techniques, and helpful information from someone who understands how frustrating software can be when it doesn’t do exactly what you want it to do.
My first tip – the next time you’re in a user guide, try searching the PDF for the content you need. In Adobe Acrobat:
1.From the menu bar, click Search (it has a binoculars icon).
2.Enter a keyword or phrase that describes what you need to find and then click Search. Acrobat searches the entire document and displays the results in the same pane.
Suggestion: Increase the width of the pane to better see the sentence that contains your keyword.
3.Select an item in the Results frame. Acrobat takes you to the page where your content is located and highlights it. If the content is not what you were looking for, select a different result.
Happy searching!