The Book Bag : Reports

Tracking Changes in Student Schedules

Katie Infinger — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:18:00 GMT

It's the beginning of the school year, so you're probably dropping, withdrawing, and transferring lots of students from classes. You can easily track these schedule adjustments so you know what's going on around you.

You'll need to set up the Academic year dates to track changes. In Configuration, open the session in the academic year, and mark the Track schedule changes beginning on checkbox and enter a starting date, which will probably be a date after you've completed student schedules, otherwise your reports could get long. After the tracking start date arrives, a ninja in your database will record schedule changes.

If you want to see the changes, just run the Drop/Add Report and you'll have all the information you need.

Calculating Total Billing for the Upcoming School Year

Katie Infinger — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:36:00 GMT

Here's a post from Blackbaud Senior Educational Consultant Chuck Hays.

Did you know there's an easy way to calculate totals for next year's billing? Have you been using the Projected Charges Report to its full advantage? (Reports -> Analysis Reports -> Projected Charges Report). This fantastic tool can give you totals by product and billing item, breakdowns by grade or month, and show student detail! Remember, you're not limited to one report parameter; create as many as you need to satisfy your reporting requirements.

The Projected Charges Report can be used before, during, and after billing for next year. If you added bill codes to student records, but you haven't added billing schedules for next year, the report can still calculate what will be billed! If you've already added billing schedules but haven't generated charges, the report can calculate financial aid and advance deposits as well. In other words, you don't need to generate the charges and credits in order to have accurate totals for next year's billing.

Here's an overview of key settings in the report.

Selecting the billing time frame and student grade levels:
- On the General tab, use the Scheduled dates to select the correct billing cycle or data range for the final charges and credits.
- If you use grade-based billing, select the option to use next year's grade level if you haven't promoted the students or the "as of" date for the grade level if you use Registrar's Office.
Selecting summary totals or student detail:
- On the Format tab, Detail section, use the "Show records..." checkbox to add student detail.
- Also in this section, you can elect to use a breakdown by grade or month.
Grouping the report:
- On the Sort tab, you can group the report by Billing Item Type by adding the Break checkbox.
- Then a second level sort by Billing Item ID.

Tips from a Troubleshooter: Favorite Tools

Sean Long — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:11:00 GMT

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 5^th 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!