May 2009 - Posts
Chapter 2: Integrated? What's that?
Possibly the largest difference between version 6 and version 7 is that the software uses one database for all of your education and accounting solutions. So what does this mean to you?
Think of The Education Edge and Student Billing as filing cabinets. In version 6, each department maintained their own filing cabinets with student, parent, and staff files. During the conversion to version 7, an intern reorganizes these files and merges them into one cabinet. You now have one file that every department can open and reference.
In essence, one filing cabinet is what having an integrated database system is about. A unified database cuts down the chance for data corruption, fosters improved communication between departments, and allows for more complex seamless processes. Let's look at some specific examples.
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- Financial Aid - In Student Billing 7, Registrar's Office, and to an extent, the Admissions Office, all play roles gathering information to help you award financial aid. This is handled on the record's Financial Aid Applications tab.
- Biographical Information - All biographical information is shared, so if you enter a parent's new contact number on a Student record in Student Billing, the number is updated on the student's record in Registrar's Office.
- Student Progression Entries - In version 6, there was no way to easily tell the grade a student was in during a specific year (and it might have been different in Registrar's Office anyway!). In version 7, the same student progression entry is available in Student Billing and Registrar's Office.
- Enrollment information - The student's enrollment status in Student Billing matches up with the student's current status in Registrar's Office.
Have other examples? Leave a comment!
This is a guest post by Chuck Hays. Chuck is a Senior Educational Consultant for Blackbaud.
Did you know we have an even easier way to correctly accrue payments for the next school year? First, let's touch on the accounting requirements. If you take money now that will be applied to next year's charges, you must accrue the money received rather than recognize the funds as revenue. Then, after adding next year's charges, you relieve (debit) the accrual and credit the student record.
In Student Billing, you accomplish everything you need using two records. First, you create the payment, and then, you apply the payment to an advance deposit charge. The payment uses the credit distribution on the advance deposit charge (an accrual liability account) rather than crediting the normal receivables summary account. Later, you generate the advance deposit credits, which reverse the accrual and also credit the student account.
In The Financial Edge 7.78, we made it easier to create the advance deposit charge while creating the payment by adding a new grid option at the bottom of the payment record. The appropriate student(s) will be listed in the grid and you can specify which advance deposits need to be created. The new grid is especially helpful when using payers who are responsible for multiple students!
For those of you using an outside service to handle electronic transfers of such payments, like 10-payment plans that start in the spring, you can also follow a simple process. You will use two additional setup requirements. First, create a query to find the students using such a payment plan, either because of a bill code or an attribute. Secondly, create an application restriction set that is limited to advance deposit items.
Then, create one advance deposit charge on one of the 10-payment plan student records. After saving the item, but before closing, use the Transaction menu option to "Add this Advance Deposit to a group of records" using the query. Then, use the option in Administration to "Import from tuition management service," which also allows you to specify the application restriction set. When you import the payments, they will only apply against the existing advance deposit charge. Very useful if other charges are still on the account.
You are working in the linking grid and see a record that does not belong, such as a withdrawn student. You right-click on the student’s row and open his Education Edge record, change his status to Withdrawn, and save and close the record. This ineligible record no longer meets the criteria based on your Integration setup, but he remains in the linking grid.
In version
7.78, you can click the Remove Ineligible Records button on the linking grid toolbar to remove these records. The Remove Ineligible Records option only refreshes the grid to remove previously eligible but no longer eligible records that are not matched.
Clicking this button will not refresh the data displayed in each column and will not add rows to the grid.
If data changes on matched records to make the matches no longer valid based on the matching criteria, the user will need to manually remove the matches or click Match All Records to recalculate the matches.
All of the teachers have entered their grades, skills, and comments in FAWeb and are ready to go. Now you need to post them to Registrar's Office so you can run performance categories, calculate GPAs or run report cards and transcripts!
To post grades, skills, and/or comments select Administration, Post from FAWeb in Registrar's Office. Next choose the School, Academic Year, and Session. Mark the option to update the posting status, which changes the Gradebook posting status, mark the appropriate checkboxes beside the items from Gradebook you would like to post, such as Grades, Comments, and Skills, and the marking columns to post from and to.
On the Filters tab, select to filter by Faculty/Staff, Classes, Courses, Departments etc. Once you select your filters, click Preprocessing Report. This report includes any exceptions that will prevent the information from posting. Reference how to troubleshoot the exceptions to post successfully.
Two common exceptions are:
- "Class not marked as ready to post"
This exception can be easily resolved by marking the class(es) ready to post individually or globally.
- "Class Not Rated for [marking column]."
This should not be viewed as an error unless the class (such as a lower school English class) should award skill ratings.
Out for now...
Episode 1: The Conversion
We ended support for Student Billing 6 on September 30, 2008. What does this mean for you? If you use Student Billing 6, you can still contact Support with software questions, but we will not be releasing patches or updates for it.
If you currently use Student Billing 6, your organization is probably considering when to convert to Student Billing 7, and whether or not you want to convert the data yourself, or enlist Blackbaud's help (ask your Account Manager about the pro's and con's of each!).
Most importantly, it means I get to start a series of Student Billing 6 vs. Student Billing 7 posts! Welcome to Episode 1: The Conversion.
Here are some tips if you decide to convert to Student Billing 7 on your own:
- Schedule extra time - Something always comes up that adds more time to your conversion schedule, whether it is a colleague out sick, an error encountered during conversion, or the swine flu. Building extra time into your conversion plan prevents stress.
- Follow the conversion documentation - We've created a lot of conversion documentation: become familiar with it. It's in PDF format, so you can search for terms you need in Adobe Acrobat
- Train, train, train - After your test conversion flawlessly completes, leave that workstation set up as a standalone. Give someone from the Billing department access to it and give them a few tasks to familiarize themselves with version 7 such as generating a month's billing items. Because many processes are slightly different in version 7, knowing them is invaluable.
- Knowledgebase - Knowledgebase contains lots of information on version 7, so try searching on "How to print statements in Student Billing 7" to get instructions specific to Student Billing 7.
I will be posting more episodes about the changes between Student Billing 6 and Student Billing 7. Want me to cover a specific process? Leave a comment below!
There are several posts on The Ledger blog highlighting some cool functionality that's also in SB. Here are a few:
You can find other SB stuff on The Ledger blog by clicking the Student Billing tag. Talk to you soon!
Our courseware developers have been hard at work creating and revamping instructor led distance learning classes for The Education Edge. Head over to the No Travel Required blog to see the list of available classes.
Each month we keep track of the top Student Billing questions you ask. Here are the top questions you asked in April and March.
April
- Why are there duplicates in the query results: BB61118
- How to troubleshoot performance issues: BB8626
- How to reconcile to the General Ledger: BB3358
- How to add and use an advance deposit: BB210506
- How to unvoid or reverse a voided check: BB6275
- How to void a posted payment: BB113811
- How to add new table entries: BB5313
March
- How to troubleshoot performance issues: BB8626
- Why are there duplicates in the query results: BB61118
- How to add and use an advance deposit: BB210506
- Bank Reconciliation shows out of balance to GL Cash Account or vice versa: BB61184
- How to reconcile to the General Ledger: BB3358
- How to add new table entries: BB5313
- How to create an advance deposit from a payment: BB230156
Talk to you soon!
Three parts of the software are invaluable to me: Query, Export, and Reports.
- Query - I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you master queries, you will master the system. There's a great Query Guide you can use to help learn about queries, but here's the short version: A query is used to group records, such as people, charges, credits, courses, classes, applicants, rooms, advance deposits, payments, deposits, or a combination! You can group records by any field you can find on a record (and some fields you won't find easily, like Record Added On date). You can use saved queries in reports, global changes, report cards/transcripts, and in your default searches.
- Export - Many of you know how to use export, I'm sure. But do you know that you can perform mail merges directly from Education Edge? And did you know you can export any field, and control for duplication with far more accuracy by using a query to filter records in export? Do you need a list of every student with a second cousin who has missed more than 3 days, their name, shoe size, and nationality? Create a query to find those students, and use it in export to pull that information (you'd have to track Shoe Size as an attribute, though).
- Reports - There are over 50 reports in Registrar's Office and 35 in Student Billing. Each report fulfills a specific need. Do you need a list of all the immunizations your 5th graders have received? Run the Medical Report. Do you need a tally of how many D's and F's Mr. Triangle (the math teacher) gave compared to Mr. Square, who teaches the same course? Run the Grade Analysis Report. What about when you need a list of the Products and Billing Items you're using this year, because you can't remember what 0010 means? Print out a Product and Billing Item List. If you see a report that you aren't familiar with, open it and press F1 to pull up the help file that describes the report!
That was a really high-level review of my three favorite and useful parts of The Education Edge. Have any questions about these? Check out Knowledgebase, the user guides, or post a comment below!
In the Royal Palace Academy Registrar's Office, Prince Adam is working on the schedule. He's already copied course restictions for next academic year, and students have entered their course requests online. The next step, according to the Scheduling Checklist, is to create classes and the master schedule. Prince Adam shoves his desk chair aside, raises his sword aloft, and shouts, "By the power of Grayskull!" He-Man is now ready to conquer scheduling.
If the Master Schedule doesn't change from year to year, He-Man can copy the master schedule to save time (and potentially Castle Grayskull). For each class, he can select to copy meetings, teachers, and rooms. This plan works only if the years being copied from and to have the same session defined, and for each session, the same timetable and terms selected.
In this episode, Royal Palace Academy changed their sessions and timetable for next year, so He-Man must create classes before he can schedule meeting times, rooms, and teachers. If the course restrictions are entered correctly, he can automatically create classes according to those restrictions. Before clicking Create Now in Create Classes, he ensures he has a valid backup and a saved copy of the scheduling scenario.
After creating classes, He-Man automatically schedules meeting times, teachers, and rooms using Generate Master Schedule.
Orko says:
Schedule in layers. Schedule the most important classes, such as senior classes and specialty classes, before scheduling remaining classes. You can manually schedule those classes and then run Generate Master Schedule. Don't mark the Clear checkboxes on the General 2 tab in the Generate Master Schedule parameter or your existing scheduled classes will be deleted. You can also run several rounds of the same Generate Master Schedule parameter to build the schedule by selecting each round's classes in the Filters tab.
Receiving exceptions? Don't worry, it's not Skeletor's attack, it's probably just a setting within your course, room, or teacher record that can be easily adjusted. Check out How to troubleshoot Generate Master Schedule exceptions for details on each exception.
You now have what it takes to defend Castle Grayskull and become the Master of the Scheduling Universe! In our next episode, He-Man conquers scheduling students.