For those of you who have upgraded to SB 7, what sort of experience did you have? Is the program performing to expectations? Thank you. Gerald O'Keeffe Business Manager Elgin Academy Elgin, IL 60120

Good Morning: With Student Billing, we have encountered a number of issues including no longer having the ability to address statements to parents while sorting by student. As well, we just discovered that the balances on the activity tabs do not always match our statement balances. BB has confirmed that this is a program issue and that a patch will be needed to fix. Tamara Phillips Trinity College School Port Hope, Ontario, Canada

Caution - if you use the 'add charges to a group' function, BEWARE. That functionality has been altered so drastically that it is lost. You can no longer take an original charge, then copy it, one by one, to a set of other records, changing only the fileds that are different, if any. Instead, yo need to create a query that finds these students, even if that query is 'all students', which then presents a list of students to choos from to whom you want to add this charge. Further, this list is either in student ID order or FIRSTNAME order, neither of which are helpful if you have many students. Lastly, you cannot change anything about these records that may be slightly different, other than the amount. So if you have, say, 50 charges to add for a sports team, made up of students from several grades, and there are 2 or 3 different amounts, you are scr***d. Also, the integration of the student billing database with the other databases (GL, Registrar, etc) has caused a tremendous slowdown in application response time, and other issues as well, such as not being able to purge students or activity, etc. Proceed carefully, and plan ahead, especially with the student merge (Student ID #'s , addresses, relations, etc).