Table of Contents
Episode Summary
Did you know that you can set up a single activity and then allow your patrons to pick the exact dates that they want to attend? Join us for a discussion all about By Day Enrollment, and we'll also show you how to set up a fee that will charge a particular amount per day, based upon the number of days selected in a week.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:08
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat Am I was Bret Alarcon. So today we're going to be talking about by day enrollment. So what this does is allows you to set up a single activity, and then allows your patrons to pick the exact dates they want to attend. So Zack is going to be showing you how to set that up, including how to set up your fees. So they charged per day. Before we start, though, if you have any questions, please ask them in a little q&a section. That's the Button down the bottom. And we'll give you some answers. Also, there's that little chat Button down there. And let me just make sure it is on actually, yes, now it is on, so you can make just comments during the presentation. And with that, I'll hand it over to the Zack How you doing today.
Zach Malloch 0:50
Not too bad, Brett you have a very impressive shade of pink.
Bret Alarcon 0:54
Yeah, I have pink lights in my room, or I should say, and I forgot to turn them off.
Zach Malloch 1:00
But anyway, that's not why people are here, people are here. Well, I mean, maybe people. But I would imagine more people are here to talk about RecTrac. And the by day enrollments, which you talked about. So we're going to just jump right in, I've got my enroll by day activity setup, there is nothing special on the activity side that we need to do to make it work for this, I just chose the description. Now if we go to sections, this is where we can make the change. So right now, I'm actually gonna pop over global sales, just real quick, I have this section and roll by day set up, it is not set to enroll by date yet. So this is the behavior that you would be familiar with that you would expect to see whenever you do an activity enrollment. So your basic, you sign up for this activity, there's no other questions or anything like that. Now when we go into the section, if I turn on allow enrollments by a day, and hit save that one Toggle changes the logic and the same activity selected. But now when I add it to the cart, and I can do this for one person, I can do it for multiple people. But I actually get a calendar. And each of the days that the activity is set up to be meeting on I set it to do Monday through Friday, from five to 6pm. I can enroll for the entire week, right there. Or I can make individual selections. So that one toggle is really the whole thing. And then the next piece would be figuring out the fees. I will show a couple of other things here. Just real quick, if we did have multiple people selected, then we will get multiple abilities to select. So technically, we have one for Erica and one for my having guy. So we can make individual selections for them, choose the days they're both going to be here, etc. If we were doing this for a lot longer period of time, let's say it's a summer camp, and it runs for multiple months. And you want to make sure that you are going to be there every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We could do something along these lines, make those selections, put in for the date range, and then Build that pattern. And that should I might have my problem. Yeah. Okay, I forgot to select my family member. important step there. Let's reset this. And let's try building the pattern again. There we go. So now we have that monday, wednesday friday pattern built out. So you can do this pretty easily. As you can see, there's a similar interface on the web so your customers can pick their own dates and times. But there is a special way to set up the fees that normally comes into play here that really doesn't tend to come into play anywhere else. Do we have some questions coming in? Brett?
Bret Alarcon 4:01
Yeah i was starting to look into it. But listen was wondering, is the pattern option fixed and WebTrac version in the WebTrac version of this now works in person and not on the web?
Zach Malloch 4:13
That I would have to test? I don't know that we'll have time to do it in the presentation. But Brett if you're looking at it in the side.
Bret Alarcon 4:19
yeah I'm checking on that. Also, Melissa is when trying to do these reservations of bulk as a pattern we get a cloud server errors for the last owl cloud server errors for the last few years has since been fixed. Yeah, okay, I'll look into that one too. And then Frankie has a wondering if there's a topic Doc to show how enabled by enroll by week but
Zach Malloch 4:44
I don't know I mean this. So I'm assuming this Button on this. They didn't make my family selection first. This Button right here on the side, Frank. That has always just kind of been there. or for me, I don't. Yeah, I'm not really sure what we would have to do to add it Oh, for WebTrac. Okay, good, important piece. Maybe you can take a look at that as well, Brett when you're poking around on it. But let's talk about the fees, because we do have a limited amount of time. And we'll take too long to do this. But I'm not going to I mean, we can certainly do resident non resident. But let's just do I should have gone into my advanced by day fee. And let's say it is $50. So we have a choice to make. And that is whether the just put it in the facility revenue, because it doesn't really matter. For this example, I need to get to the advanced fees, and then we'll start talking about the choice that we need to make. So advanced fee change could have just gone straight here. But we have our time, base settings in our day care settings, I'm going to talk about both of them just real briefly, if you have an activity and each day is just a flat rate, then all you have to do is set this to daily. And as long as this value is the amount to charge per day, you don't have to worry about anything down here, it will just charge you one $50 charge per number of days that that class meets. This includes if you have skipped days, so if you have July 4. And so one class is only going to be meeting for days that week, that one week will cost $50 less or one day's enrollment less, because we switch this to daily. Now, if we're going to go with a little bit more complicated route, but also a little bit more common, as far as how I've seen fees structured, we have our timeframe, and then we have our fee length. So this is where we're talking about this number is this the amount that we're charging per day, or is this the amount that we're charging for an entire week, and then kind of dividing it out. And frequently we'll have multiple fees. So let's say that this is one to two days a week. And let's say it's $50 per day. So we'll leave this as a day. But I want to measure this by the week. And this is one to two days. So as long as one or two days are selected, I will charge $50 per day. So let's go ahead and hit Save. And then we'll clone this, we'll just make a quick little change to it rather than an entirely different structure. And we'll make it once again, I really wanted to go into my advanced fee change so that I can get to those daycare settings. So we'll just load that backup. And in this case, we'll say that for three to four days, you get a $5 discount per day. So $45 rather than $50. Three to four, there we go. And then this can stay the same, except we're going to now update this. So if we have between three and four days, then we will charge $45 per day. And then the last option, we're going to set the fee length to a week just to kind of illustrate what that looks like as well. So let's clone this again. And this time, I'll remember to go into advanced fee change immediately. And so if it was $50 per day, it'd be $250 for an entire week $45 breaks, it gets it down a little bit lower than that. But let's just say that we're going to give a big break. And if you come for all five days, it's just going to be $100 for the entire week. So we're really trying to encourage that. We just set that as the same value for beginning and ending days. So now I have these three fees set up to cover all of the configurations that I could do for the number of days that can be selected. And now I will pick a child I still have that activity selected. I'll add that to my cart. And let's do all five for the first week. Let's do 123 And then four Actually, it'd be faster to do this take one off and then take two off
Okay, so now we have all of the varieties of those fees selected and what we can see actually
Yeah, so I think maybe I forgot to update that fee all the way maybe i i did not change it to away from being a daily fee which is why it's true. Using $100 per day rather than $100 for the week. So let me just fix that. And then we'll go and analyze what we are seeing. So because this is a weekly rate, I should have updated that to say it was a week. And now that is saved. And I'm just going to get rid of these first five, because those are the wrong fee. But what we can see is, so for three days, we get the $50. Rate. And actually, that's from a separate week, I think. So that's our single day, that's our two days, and then we get our $50 rate, we go to three days, we're starting to get our $45 rate per day, we got a four days, we're getting our $45 rate per day. So let's empty that cart. And we'll just do a full week and show what that is actually supposed to look like. And so it takes the the amount of the week divided by the number of days selected, and then inserts that. And if we wanted to play around with this a little bit more just to kind of demonstrate some of the flexibility. Let's make this actually, let's see, I see a question came in. Pam is asking if you can use a lottery feature for enrolled by a day. And I believe that you can. That's another one I haven't really looked at, I know that we are doing some updates to lottery in general. It was talked on during the roadmap session at the symposium last week. And then I was asking if it would be different if using installment billing. So the way you set up your fees would be the same thing, it's just going to consolidate your bills based usually daycare is every two weeks doesn't have to be and you have the choice of billing in advance for the weeks that are about to happen or in arrears for the weeks that just happened. And it seems like in daycare situations, a lot of times people are adding and dropping days and moving them around or not showing up for particular days. So doing it in arrears for the week that just happened with all of the changes theoretically locked in is generally the easier way to do that. And then any of these weeks, that fall within that two week range, any of these individual fees get rolled up into a single bill for your customers. So what I was going to do, hopefully that helps Alyssa is inactivate these guys. There it is right here.
And then I'm going to change this one to make it one to five days. So no matter how many days you're selecting, need to go to advance again, no matter how many days you are selecting, it will always be $100 For the week, which means one day will be $100 for two days will be $50 per day, three days, etc. And we'll have some rounding in there for the three days. But all I'm going to do is make that one to five. And so this is just an example, to show how it can work. Obviously, this fee structure doesn't really make a lot of sense. Let's add to the cart, let's add back to the cart. We already saw what happened if we do the full week, if we do one day. And then we go to the next month and do two and then three and four.
And so the other benefit that we really get from this. So of course, we just have the one section to pick and then we make our individual selections from inside of that. So that's that's a huge improvement over what it was in in previous versions of RecTrac and 10.3. And earlier, we'd have to have a separate section for each individual day. So you might have 100 sections for your daycare classes. And obviously, that could fill up the Screen pretty quickly. So we can see here that we'll sort it by our amount. So that's all grouped together. So this is our five day week. This is our three day week and we see that rounding so we have that extra penny on one of the days then we have our $50 for two day weeks and $100 for a single day because we only chose one day for that week. So that is the example of if you can put anything in here and RecTrac will do that math. That's kind of the piece that I'm trying to get to with this explanation. And I think there is a though I just saw the chat were John caught my mistake earlier where I didn't change the length of the fee. So the other piece I was going to mention real quick is that with the daycare classes, we often will run into using our enrollment counts, enrollment max count links. So you know, the benefit of having these individual days is you can run a roster for each day, you know exactly which kids are going to be there exactly which days. So it gets more specific, it takes a little bit longer time to enroll people. But generally speaking, that extra specificity as far as exactly which days people are going to be here, is important and useful. But under miscellaneous settings, and this is at the activity level, we can put in an enrollment max count links. So maybe this would be my am class. And then maybe I would also create a PM, enroll by day class and maybe a full day enroll by day class. And I can link all of those together so that we have the right number, we never go above the capacity. So we're, you know, in my section, I just said that there are 20 kids that can be here for this activity. But this is from five to 6pm, if there was also a five err might be very early, but let's say a seven to 8am. It's a morning care, and then you have full day, and then you have your evening care. If you link all of those enrollment maxes together, it will make sure that you don't go above the total capacity for the room or your your ratio of children to providers. So that is sometimes a useful piece. They're trying to think of it as any other pieces. Are there any other questions that have been coming in aside from a couple of those functionality questions, Bret?
Bret Alarcon 14:30
Nothing new. I'm kind of trying to dig into all the open questions right now. Melissa, I'm not finding anything in any of the Modifications Listing saying there's been any update to enrollment by day for the web. So we might need to check on your ticket. Do you know if you have a ticket number I can kind of look into and then Frank I think do you see the for Frank, do you see the enroll by week Button and RecTrac RecTrac? And just not WebTrac?
Okay, Frank said yes. Okay. So let me look into that a little deeper.
Okay, here's one Ashley wants to know, I joined a little late. So I may have missed this with the fee structure you created it disease? Is it easy to create a resident and non resident rate for the same item in this feature?
Zach Malloch 17:47
Yes, absolutely. So all I would have to do is create a sub one in my module update, all I would need to do is go into my section or at this, you know, I would probably be doing this at the activity level. But for my testing purposes, it makes sense to have it a little bit more specific and at a lower level. But yes, it'd be very, it follows all of the exact same fee logic. So if we wanted to say it's $100 for a week for residents, and $150 a week for non residents, all we would do is either put in the non resident $50 and just link it to non res because if there's no criteria, they'll get charged this $100 as well, and then the $50 on top of that, or we make this your resident rate with the criteria, then we have a separate line that is your non resident rate. But yeah, all of the same logic works, all of the same setup would apply and you just duplicate it for each different price point, you would need to. To WebTrac and see if I can get That's a good name. There it is. There's my enroll by day section here, and.
To just Click it doesn't have to refresh the entire Screen when they're doing this. But yeah, that would be a useful feature to give to your customers. Because if they wanted to get all of these, you're going to have to Click on 20 times rather than just four times. And then maybe something along the top to do a select every Monday select every Tuesday as well. We can certainly write those up. Yeah, so Melissa, your question was originally about the pattern reservations on the web, right? Or was it just that you are doing the registrations for yourself in person Using the patterns and getting those error messages
Bret Alarcon 20:08
Yeah, so I think with the pattern option and WebTrac they were not able to do it on the web and registrations in bulk as a pattern for RecTrac. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.
Zach Malloch 20:31
Okay, so, yeah, you're saying that
Bret Alarcon 20:33
you're getting for both person and impressing them for that
Zach Malloch 20:37
building the patterns in person? I mean, those are definitely some strange error messages. I don't know what a cloud server error. I don't think I've ever seen that. It's probably something. Where are you? I apologize. I don't have your email in front of me. But where are you from? Louis? I was wondering if maybe it's something we could have hosted grab some logs from or something along those lines.
Bret Alarcon 21:03
Belvedere Park District.
Zach Malloch 21:08
Yeah, I'm not. Not positive, what would be going on there. But if you're getting those error messages, and it's pretty easy to repeat, then it should be pretty easy for us to investigate and resolve it. I know that you said you had some tickets, but we'll we'll make sure they get there.
Bret Alarcon 21:26
That there's a ticket open, I can reopen that. If not, I can just create it.
Zach Malloch 21:34
Yeah, because the other piece like with cloud server, like there are certain error messages, we get very familiar. And that just doesn't sound like a RecTrac error message. Maybe we can certainly take a look at the tickets. But I wonder if it's something that might be pointing towards your server? Because
Bret Alarcon 21:50
I think I got zero hits for the cloud server.
Zach Malloch 21:54
And then Alyssa is asking with the pattern WebTrac. So right now, it seems like the pattern is disabled unless there is a way to do it that I am not thinking of at the moment. Is there a way for family to make families select a consistent schedule from week to week. And there's not any way to force that, you know, kind of had a conversation with somebody about something like this at the symposium. And it it's the flexibility, when you open it up and you let people choose exactly the days that going to be there, you kind of don't need to force them into certain patterns any longer. It accommodates everything, and then the days that they're if they're not going to be there on a particular day, the second week, and it's going to vary from what they were there from the first week, it just means there's an extra slot there for another kid to potentially take the space. So typically speaking, it is a little bit of a balance between letting go of some control, to give that extra flexibility to your customers. If you wanted to do that, if you did have to force people to doing the same patterns, then I think what I would recommend you do is create separate activities that are those patterns. So if you can only come Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, or the entire weeks, and you want to force one of those three patterns, when people you can make three different sections, and just make it so that the entire activity is running for the entire time. And one is just set up for Monday, Wednesday, Friday. One is just set up for Tuesday, Thursday, one is set up for Monday through Friday. And then using enrollment max count links to make sure that you're not going above. Now that does run into a little bit of a gap, because you're not now tracking every single individual day you're tracking the overall activity. So you would be reducing the capacity of those pattern weeks basically. Because if somebody signed up for Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it doesn't really distinguish that as a separate registration, counting towards different enrollment counts than somebody that enrolled for Tuesday, Thursday. So when you enroll for Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then somebody else enrolls from Tuesday, Thursday, you're taking two slots out of the entire week instead of just one which technically speaking, because of the way they interact with each other, you could it you should have full availability on each of those other days. So forcing a pattern is possible. I think there are some drawbacks to it. And I can certainly understand the desire to have that control and and really limit what people can do. It is there are certain things we can do with rules. We can one of the main things is people don't they want to be able to kind of anticipate who's going to be there. So if you just set up a rule that disallows changes out After like within a week of when the actual classes taking place, then it kind of locks in schedules a week in advance or, you know, there's plenty of stuff you can do with policy for that as well. So I think that takes us about to the end. If anybody else has any other questions for us, please let us know. But we'll certainly look into the pattern options for the web. And we'll get a little deeper into your situation, Melissa, and see what's going on there.
Bret Alarcon 25:29
A couple more questions snuck in, if you got a moment, can you limit the number of days a person can enroll in a month
Zach Malloch 25:38
should be a rule. I think we could do it with a rule. But I feel like we might have run into a situation where this is a little bit tough, because technically speaking, it's not a separate section. It's all one section where we're just putting in the specific dates. And I think I remember looking for rules for that, and not finding the right match. And I believe that I wrote something up about that at that time. So I don't know for sure if that is still the case. But yeah, I don't know for sure. A soft whim, I'm not going to even what I was thinking is we could go through. So if we look at this in the advance fee change, we do have the ability of changing our date ranges. So if you wanted to say that your timeframe is within a month, then you can say up to 20 days is one rate and then anything above 20 days is significantly more expensive. And then that would kind of discourage people from registering for too many. But that would also maybe not be the best customer service solution to have them suddenly see a much more expensive just because of an extra day or something along those lines rather than a rule. And then I see that Diane asked a question about setting a rule that they have to pick their schedule by a certain date. So yes, we can set a limit on the registration, I believe, actually, I see that. Yeah, John is kind of confirming that advanced criteria gets us close to that. But once again, because it's days and not sections, it's a little bit weird. But as far as the date, so if we did a transaction date rule, now it's going to be days from my apologies, days from. And actually this in let's see, because yeah, this would be a little bit tough, because we would have to put in a different rule for different dates, I think, because there's only going for the item beginning and the ending date and not for the actual, like, there are a couple of weird things like that, that do come into play with with the URL by day. But this would be a good point or a good opportunity for me to update myself on where some of those enhancements stand and see if we can get a little bit more tied into this once we have something specific
Yeah, I think we would have to. So I don't think I can say yes to those questions at the moment. And then and you're asking for lottery would be the other option. And I know you asked a question about Lottery but I'm, I'm not sure which option you're referring to. That it might be the other one for
I could turn on, I suppose, since we are in the last couple of minutes and why not test? Oh, this is another piece I wanted to mention. As soon as you've done registrations, you can no longer turn this Toggle on or off. So you do have to make this decision and then it will be that decision once you have done so. I was going to switch to lottery enrollments I haven't done lottery enrollments and so on let's see what happens.
Yeah, looks like Should work basically the same way as other stuff does. So you have a second choice. Now, I haven't used lottery enrollment myself in a very long time. So but yeah, it looks like it was giving you a lottery enrollment for each of the individual days I should have been opened up and in there, they are not being charged for anything. So yes, it works with lottery logic, to answer your earlier question. Oh, and I see that you're, you're curious if limiting the number of enrollments could be done with lottery, I, we were only going to be looking at maybe like the the main enrollment numbers anyway. So they could they could lottery enroll for an entire month. And if you're trying to prevent them from doing that there wouldn't be anything inherently limiting in the lottery process for that. So I think what we need is maybe a couple more criteria that tie into, or options for existing criteria that that tie into the the by day enrollment stuff. And then that gives us a little bit more control over how we tie it into other rules and all the similar logic that we all expect anyway. But I think that is about what I wanted to cover. In this session. Hopefully it was useful. Hopefully it answered some of your questions. And if anybody has been curious about using this, I think it would get you to a good point where you can start to play with it. Of course, whenever I say anything like that i in badly suggest that you try using it in your Demo database first. Yeah, that's, that's RecTrac.
Bret Alarcon 31:46
And Melissa and Frank, I got tickets going for you guys. So hopefully, you should hear back. So hopefully somebody can help you out further with your questions.
Zach Malloch 31:56
and actually see one last one from Diana at the end, could you please show how the fees and rules are set for enroll by day. That was kind of the entire first part of this is when I was going through the fees. So we'll we'll post the recording shortly. And you'll be able to see that I didn't really do anything with rules. In Part of the reason for that is as some of the last questions were coming in is anything as far as like limiting the number of enrollments you can have on a particular or not limiting the number of days for a month, forcing the same days, multiple weeks. Those are not things we can really tie into. We can certainly play with registration dates, you have to register before the class starts. You can't register after the class starts. So if you have to Build your summer camp schedule before the class starts, that is certainly easy, because we do have an activity beginning date and that ties in to everything. So yeah, I guess, Diana, we need to know specifically what Type of rules you're looking for. And then we can have another conversation about that. But we are out of time today now. So I would invite anybody to email me if you have any questions or just open a support ticket if you want to get into that. I think I have a longer enrolled by day virtual symposium out there too. So if anybody who's a virtual symposium subscriber, you should have access to that. And I think we're ready to close it down Bret
Bret Alarcon 33:28
well, to help if I was not on mute. Thanks, everyone.
Zach Malloch 33:31
Thanks. Bye