2019 marks the 30-year anniversary for Class! Look out for special announcements throughout the year.

Over the months and years, we’ve shared loads of little tips to help our 2,500+ customers use Class more effectively.

Today, to kick off the celebrations of our 30-year anniversary, we’ve gathered up our 30 top tips to share some neat little tricks you may not have known about that make Class so special.

See all 30 tips below and contact us if you have any questions or need a helping hand when trying some of these out.

1.  Enrolment Finance – Force Recalculation

Occasionally after the final invoice has been produced, an amendment needs to be made to a student’s booking which requires a new invoice (e.g., a change in course value, accommodation, transfers, sundry items). By amending dates within the booking, you can force a recalculation in order to produce a new invoice.

2.  Statistics – Student Numbers by Agent and Country Report

The enrolment statistics report easily enables you to report on student numbers (count) within a specific date range and report by days, weeks, months or years.

3.  Group Date Wizard

Don’t forget that the Group Date Wizard can be used to batch update the booking dates of a whole group. This is helpful if a group is arriving or departing on a different date than first advised. Also, the Group Batch Update from within the Admissions tab can be used to update transfer details as well as courses and accommodation as a batch.

4.  Batch Printing of Documents

Remember that you can batch print documents to students, families and agents. First, you create a document within Class and then create a Quick Report to produce the list of students that you wish to produce the documents for. Within the Quick Report there is an option to ‘Search’ and then ‘Send Document’ and this will produce the documents for all the students/families/agents within the list. The documents can be printed or emailed.

5.  Linked Price Items

Did you know that you can link different price items to each other? For example, an accommodation price item can be linked to a sundry item such as an accommodation booking fee. This means when adding the particular accommodation price item into an enrolment, the accommodation booking fee will automatically be added. Other examples for using linked items include registration fees, exam fees, book fees and summer supplements that are to be shown on the invoice separately.

6.  Aged Debt Report

When lots of bookings are coming in, don’t forget to use your Aged Debt Report for chasing outstanding payments. As long as you are using the Class Ledger to enter payments from both students and agents, you can use the Aged Debt Report to see outstanding balances.

7.  Student Visa Passport & Sponsorship Checking

There is an easy-to-use report that will enable you to list all students in a given date range whose visas/passports and UK Sponsorship are due to expire. This report will help you to ensure that students are studying with valid documentation.

8.  Copy/Cancel Enrolments

If you have entered an enrolment with the wrong agent and the final invoice has already been produced, you can change the agent without having to cancel and recreate the entire enrolment by using the Copy/Cancel button.

9.  Promotions

A promotion is an additional incentive for selected students, agents and products, typically for a temporary period of time. You can apply three different types of promotions within Class:

• Additional percentage discount/commission.
• Buy ‘x’ weeks, get ‘y’ weeks free.
• Fixed value discount per booking or week.

A good example for the use of a promotion is that you can charge an agent/student for a 10-week course but at the 20-week rate (i.e. 1-10 weeks is £100 per week, 11+ weeks is £90 per week). Instead of the invoiced value being £1000 it would be £900. This is useful when a student changes course and you want to give him or her the benefit of the total length of stay.

10.  Deferred Income/Forward Sales

Do you need to prepare for your monthly “Deferred Income” report (items invoiced for services not yet provided)? An invoicing statistics report from Class can provide this information for you.

11.  Credit & Re-Invoicing

If you wish to produce an additional invoice for a student or an agent AFTER the main invoice has been produced without affecting the original invoice, it’s easy. For example, you might need to invoice for extra lessons, books, exam fees, excursions, etc. Just go to the Student’s Enrolment screen > Invoicing tab > and remove the tick against the field “Use Credit and Re-Invoice Method”.

12.  Comparison Statistics

Want to know if your booking numbers are higher or lower at this time last year? Easy! You can produce statistics at a certain date and compare them to the same date for previous years. This report can be produced by school, country, agent, course and also group.

13.  Host Accommodation Payments

Don’t forget to check the “Payment to” and “Only consider students starting before” dates when carrying out the first run after a holiday break (e.g. Christmas or Easter). It may be that you have missed a payment run, so you need to change the dates manually. From then on, your dates should be in line.

14.  Price Items

If you add/amend price items within the price list (Maintenance/Settings > Maintenance), a warning is now displayed if a Nominal Code (Nom) or Promotional Nominal Code (Pnl) is entered that is not in the standard list within System Settings. To ensure that only items from the standard list of codes are used, switch on the option “Cost Centre\Department\Nominal Codes Pick Only” within Maintenance/Settings > General Settings > Company > Company > Finance > Ledger.

15.  Class Ledger

Within the Ledger Verification there is an option to run the verification against just one account. From the Account Browse screen, highlight the account and click on the “Verify” button. It is also possible to choose whether you wish to check for Group Integrity Issues within the original Ledger Verification.

16.  Bulk Document Sending in Quick Reports

Don’t forget that you can use Quick Reports to generate a list and then send documents to all the students, agents or host families from the list as a mailshot instead of generating one document at a time. The documents can be printed or emailed directly from Class. This is very helpful when dealing with groups. For example, you can produce a list of all the students within the group and then send a confirmation letter to all host families for those students.

17.  Emailing from Class

You can email documents and invoices directly from within Class to your agents (partners), students and accommodation providers. For your school, you set this up under Maintenance/Settings > General Settings > Company > Company > Email. Then for individual users, follow Maintenance/Settings > General Settings > Company > Users > Emailing.

18.  Default Settings in Class

Remember that there are default status settings in Class. For example, when opening up the Agent Browse screen, the default setting shows ALL agents: active, inactive, prospective, and suspended. You can, if desired, choose one of these options as a default status. This setting applies to the agent browse, accommodation browse, enrolment browse and student browse. Currently all of these lists display the first 250 records, but this can also be amended to show any number of records. The above default settings can be updated within: Maintenance/Settings > General Settings > Company > Company > General > General Defaults 2.

19.  Invoicing Statistics Report

Did you know that the Invoicing Statistics report can be used to show student numbers (count) as well as student weeks and values, including Gross, Net, Commission paid and unpaid? The report can be based upon tuition only and show a breakdown by agent, country, language, group, price item name, nominal code, cost centre, department… to name just a few.

20.  Agent Stats/Performance

You can see how a particular agent is performing in just a few clicks. Open up that agent’s record and select the ‘Statistics’ tab. Enter your date selection using the ‘Year Starting’ and ‘As at today’ to see this year and last year based on the selected dates. A further 5 years of comparison for each full year is also listed.

21.  Emailing Formats

If you’d like all of your agents, students and/or host families to be emailed in a different format to that which has already been set up in Class against their individual accounts, you can do this in batch. For example, you can email all of your contacts in PDF format instead of Word. This can be done as follows within Class: File > Special Functions > Batch Email Format Update > Agents/Students/Accommodation.

22.  Ledger Balance References

Do your students and agents sometimes forget to add a reference when paying you a part or full balance? In the Class Ledger “Account Browse” screen, if you tick the “Include Balance” box, you are able to see all payment values against their accounts, and you can even search by a specific value.

23.  Quick Browse

Within certain browse menus you can right-click on a record to gain quick access to areas. This saves having to open the record and click through menus. For example, if you go to the “Enrolment” browse screen and right-click on a student’s name, you can directly add a new item (i.e. tuition, accommodation, transfer, sundry, package) as well as create a dated note, a document and even add attendance, absence and progress scores. You also have the option to go directly to the student /agent record and their finance screens.

24.  Accommodation Payment Run

When a list of payments is displayed, you can remove the tick in the right-hand column to stop this item being included in the run. It will, however, automatically be included in the next run.

25.  Additional Invoice Templates

On the Enrolment “Invoice” tab you can select to produce the invoice using a different document template than the default one set against the Agent. This is handy for those occasions when an agent asks for a different layout.

26.  Group Import

Did you realise that Class has the facility to import student details (e.g. name, gender, DOB, etc.) from an Excel spreadsheet provided by the agent? There is an easy button that creates a Windows CSV file which you send to an agent. The agent completes the fields, returns the Excel spreadsheet and you then re-import it into Class.

27.  Quick Report Permissions

In Quick Reports, there is a “Permission” option where you can designate a particular report as “public”, “public read-only” or “private”. This can help to prevent your reports from being amended or run by other Class users.

28.  Academic Terms

Within Class you can set up terms (e.g. Autumn, Spring, Summer). You will still input a student’s enrolment for the academic year (September to June) but you can invoice by each individual term.

29.  Class Registers

Aside from the built-in Crystal Reports register that comes with Class, you also have the option to create/design your own Word merge register for classes. This can include photos of students, the teacher and also a symbol of a cake to indicate any student celebrating a birthday.

30.  Enquiry Conversions

If a student is added as an enquiry, you can enter the source and the channel – how they heard from you (e.g., website visit, recommendation) and how they contacted you (e.g., email, phone call). You can then produce a report that shows you the percentage of students that converted to enrolments across the sources/channels within a particular date range. Quite an important function for when it comes to deciding how to spend your marketing budget!

Have your own tip to share?

Let us know in the Comments section below!

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