RecChat: COVID 19 Bulk Cancellations - 03/17/2020
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Support Specialist Joe Chevalier to discuss bulk cancellation processes that are available should your department need to cancel entire activities due to COVID 19 or other emergencies. The pair touch on how to cancel a section and issue refunds, use the roster fee change utility, and notify your patrons about any cancellations or closures.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:04
All right, and we are live in this very special edition of RecChat special potentially for not the most exciting of reasons. So, before we get started, how is everybody? Hope you're doing? Okay? That's very strange, very weird out there, but we'll get through it. I'm joined today by Joe Chevalier
Joe Chevalier 0:25
How we doing Zach?
Zach Malloch 0:26
one of our support and implementation or support specialists. I'm very good, Joe, thank you very much. And we noticed that we're getting a lot of calls a lot of people responding to the conditions outside by doing mass cancellations, canceling activities, wanting to extend passes, closing facilities, and fitness centers, and all that sort of stuff. And there's some utilities that RecTrac has in place that can help you with a lot of that, and Joe's gonna show us a few of those. So we're just gonna go get right started. We have the q&a area question and answer right at the bottom of your Screen. So if you bring that up any questions that you get at any point, go ahead and post them upvote any questions you're really interested in We have Nick Salvatori, Robert Kirk, and Leigha Phillips and Cullen Barber on our panelists team today to help with those questions as they come in with text. All that being said, without further ado, Joe. So some cool stuff.
Joe Chevalier 1:18
Thank you, Zack, I just want to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick's Day. No, it's probably not the typical celebration y'all used to but still should be a good time to celebrate that culture there. So I'm going to switch over to my Screen here and share out my RecTrac Screen.
Today, we're going to be basically focused in 3.1 in the new UI, so for those of you that don't see RecTrac Like this, that means that there's probably an update ready for you guys to update to and switch to our new look and feel just for those of you that have not seen this before. This is the new UI functionality is still very similar, biggest biggest changes that your menu is now on the left to just kind of give you some background that see this differently than you're used to.
Zach Malloch 2:02
And actually just one thing to jump in. Joe's absolutely right, we're going to be focusing on 3.1 in the new UI, we will touch base on 10.3. and a couple of cases where we have an equivalent feature in the older version.
Joe Chevalier 2:15
Alright, so the first place, I wanted to start with some of our bulk utilities that are kind of designed for issues like this, where we have, you know, a virus outbreak. And what's different here is that a lot of the stuff we need to do is in bulk. That way you're not spending tedious hours, doing single cancellations over and over and over again. So the first place I want to touch on is activity section management and doing some bulk cancellations where we're giving customers back their money because many of you, as you know, are canceling your activities do the Coronavirus. So I'm going to go into activity section management here I have it as a home Button here or I can go over to my menu and search for activity section management. And we'll pop that open here. So for today I'm going to use an example of tiny touch gymnastics here. I had four enrollments, you can see my enrolled. Count here is at four. And let's say this class was cancelled through the Coronavirus. How would I handle refunding all these people? You know, in this case, I only have four enrolled but you guys might have classes where you have 30 plus. So how do we get those cancellations money back in their pocket.
So down at the bottom here, there's going to be a Button for cancel section. Depending on your Screen design, you might have a Button somewhere around here that says more with cancel section built out within there. So for now, I'm just using this cancel section Button. And it only works at one section at a time. So if you need to cancel 30 sections, that will be 30 cancellations using this Button here. But still, that's better than having to cancel out all the single enrollments. So I'm just going to highlight my section I want to cancel and Click Cancel section.
And basically what this Screen gives us the option to do is to choose how we're going to give money back to the customers. Since we're not looking at each person's transaction history. The two options we have for refunding our refund apply and refund finance so we can either put a credit on the household using refund apply that we can decide on what we're going to do with that refund later. Or we can do refund finance and then those checks will be cut for the patrons at to finances liesurely. So the important thing to remember here is that if the customer is adamant that they need the money back on their card, just set them up with refund apply and then we can refund that credit balance later as whatever pay code that they're interested in receiving that
Down below that option there. There's going to be just some settings to go along with this. These are pretty self explanatory but basically if you want to cancel weightless enrollments anyway or only that would be used probably not so much in this situation. I'm moreso, when you're just trying to get the waitlist enrollments off a section kind of outside of this realm, but you can Toggle that on if you want. Otherwise, it's going to do everything.
Do we want to delete Facility Reservation so if you book an activity Facility Reservation, do we now want to remove that because the class is not happening? I would say probably you'd pretty much always want to Toggle this on that way. You know, your maintenance crews have an accurate depiction about what classes are meeting when and where. And then do we want to email the receipt to the patrons letting them know of the cancellation again, another good option to Toggle on
Zach Malloch 5:51
and actually tying in to that Carrie was asking about a copy of the receipt. So they'll need to keep a copy for themselves as well as emailing to the customer. So this will obviously get it to the customer.
Joe Chevalier 6:01
Yes.
Zach Malloch 6:02
And then getting a copy for the office, you bulk receipt print to get that?
Joe Chevalier 6:06
Yeah, we could use a bulk receipt print utility here. That's probably something you guys haven't used much before. But it is an option in the system to do a bulk print. And then this basically just lets you set a date, range and a time. And basically select the printer, you know, make sure your VIC is connected if you're going to be printing to the printer.And then you can hit print. And that's really quite, quite easy. Here, if we just select our activity section, we have a print option here where you can actually physically select the section you just cancelled. And then you could bulk print these so that you could keep them. Another option is you could just head right into receipt, reprint, if you're just looking for a couple of them, here we are.
And if you hit search, you can basically see all the receipts generated for the day down here. So you can highlight any which one of them and then you know, preview that receipt if it was a cancellation. So something to keep in mind, bulk print or receipt, reprint, or even just hopping into your document center. No problem, you don't go in there a whole lot. But the doc center does hold all the receipts from the day. So if we change our receipts for the document types up here, we can see any receipts process by yourself. Or you could switch it to all users and see, you know, all other receipts thing with it. This is my small database, and I'm the only one in there. So that's why it's just mine.
Alright, last little settings on the cancel. you if you want to track it to a different user, other than yourself a different drawer or different refund date, you can feel free to change those. So in this case, I'm just going to hit process here. And basically just goes to the server and it runs that process to basically run the cancellations. And then from there, everybody is cancelled out of the section. So if I come back to my data grid here, scroll up and hit refresh. Let's see here. So this is now a section that we cancelled here and lets see
Zach Malloch 8:23
somebody running through it?
Joe Chevalier 8:24
Yeah, so it's still probably running on the server right now.
Zach Malloch 8:27
So so we had a couple of questions come in. Maybe while we're waiting for this, the first one is that people are reporting that the proration doesn't function, if you are using the bulk cancellation.
Joe Chevalier 8:38
With bulk cancellation, how it's going to work is it's just going to cancel and put whatever they paid back onto the household. If you're looking to do custom prorations that would be a chance where you would maybe go to the household and update that. Or we have another utility called roster fee change where you can maybe do a little bit of that work in bulk.
So that would probably be my next segue, I will just show you here in documents center, I did get my three cancellations received. So I'm just going to pop one of those open. So it can see that Jack Black was cancelled out of this class. And it basically put a credit balance on the household so
Zach Malloch 9:19
And real quick Joe also it doesn't look like there's a way to put a note on to these cancellation receipts,
Joe Chevalier 9:24
right. It is a little bit limited in what we can do for the cancellation there. So you know, it's good to you know, just be transparent by emailing you know, kind of the rosters and saying hey, we canceled for these reasons. So kind of what you see is what you get on that bulk cancellation Screen. So if it's not going to work for you, it probably stuck you know, maybe going through a little bit more of the cancellation from you know, purchase history or something like that. Alright, any questions? About the cancellation process at all, just shoot them in the chat and we'll we'll address those. Lets see,
Zach Malloch 10:10
so Nereus is asking they have a cancellation fee set at the module level, when you process the section cancellations, can you waive the fee.
Joe Chevalier 10:17
So those surcharges to see at the module level won't actually come into play here, because usually those are prompted fees. So at this point, you know, it's not something you can do, it's purely going to refund the customer, you know, whatever they paid in full. It's kind of used for these scenarios where there's been a virus or something like that, that, you know, they just need to get their money back somehow and let them know that the activities canceled. So, again, a little a little limited in terms of, you know, individual, you know, roster fee changes when you use the scope cancellation.
Zach Malloch 10:55
Let's see. So Tremaine is asking if there's a way to cancel multiple sections, at the same time, we can cancel everybody in the section but no,
Joe Chevalier 11:01
right?
Zach Malloch 11:01
multiple sections at onces. So
Joe Chevalier 11:03
Unfortunately, this is a, you know, a one to one ratio here, we're canceling one section at a time. So if you have multiple sections, that will be you know, a cancel one per section kind of experience for you. So still better than canceling all the single enrollments. But you know, a little limited in terms of you have to do one section at a time.
Zach Malloch 11:24
And then Peter had a question. So does everyone need to agree on getting the refund or getting the credit in order to do the bulk cancellation? And you basically do have to choose one or the other, right? And it's going to apply the same refund to everybody in that activity? So you unfortunately don't have the ability to have individual people say, Well, I want to do this. I want to do this, although there was a question that Nicolas had, asking about potentially having customers refund money to their own cards. Now, technically, that would be something where you, we could go down the path of opening things up and allowing customers to cancel for themselves online. But then that's going to get into a couple other things probably menu designed to open that option in WebTrac. A lot of people turn that off, if they don't allow self cancellation, as well as updating fees. We'll talk about some bulk fee updates in a moment. But there are a couple of steps involved with doing that. So that would technically let customers cancel themselves, then they'd be able to choose refund apply or refinance or refund now and credit their credit cards back. But as far as the stuff that we can do, kind of in this whole process and RecTrac It's either refund apply just putting the credit on their household, and they can use it for something else for refund financing, you mail them a check back at some point.
Joe Chevalier 12:41
Yeah, I think if you have any specific scenarios where you might have some one offs, you know, I probably would go the refund apply route. And then from there anyone that you did a refund apply for, you could end up doing a refund finance, using that same credit that you just created. So still, it's still flexible after the cancellation happens. But you know, just for the pure cancellation side, it's apply or refund finance.
Alrighty, close out some things here. And you can see now that when I refreshed my DataGrid I'm not showing canceled sections, but tiny tots did disappear. I can bring it back to show the cancel things. One, one note, I will say keep in mind when you go to global sales purchase history, oftentimes you won't see canceled items because of a filter. So just keep in mind, if you're not seeing something you cancelled and someone's purchase history, that you might not just be showing that canceled status for transaction Type. So if you include that you will see their canceled items in purchase history.
Alright, another thing we need to talk about a little bit is maybe adjusting fees for a section in bulk. Lets say everyone bought the class for $100, and it was almost done, but you know really $50 of that should be maybe discounted, you give them a credit back because they are missing out on class. So one thing we do have here is roster fee change. So this works very similar to cancel section. In that really you just select one section at a time and then come down to roster fee change. Again you might have a button with more, and it might be kind of a sub button within that button. For my screen here its just going to be roster fee change. And this gives us an option to whether increase or decrease fees by a flat amount. So in here you basically need to decide are we increasing or decreasing. Based off what we are seeing lately it would probably be a decrease fee because not many people are increasing fees becuase of this by any chance. And then basically what you will do is you find the fee you want to increase or descrease.
In this case, I have some non resident fees and a resident fee. I have some old ones showing up there just from from a test I was running here. But so let's say this was a, I had three patrons that were charged 150. And then I had, you know, one person charged 200. So let's say I want to decrease their fees by $50, what I can do is come down to my face. So I know the non resident fee that should be decreased by $50. So you can use this little pencil here to Inline Edit this fee amount. And this fee change is basically going to be the difference that you're going to decrease the fee by. So it's going to say 150 was my fee, I'm going to decrease my fee by $50. So it should basically change anyone that enrolled for 150, down to $100. And then, for the resident fee, I'll just confirm that save there, I'll come down to my resident fee here and I will do the same. just deselect that fee. And I'm just basically I could do a $50 decrease for here as well.
And then when you're ready to process this, you do want to make sure that you have the fees highlighted that you want to include. So I'm going to select my resident and non resident fee, because those are the ones I'm decreasing. And, you know, down here, basically who we want to apply these changes to so I'm going to select everybody. And then down here, we have some kind of settings to go along with this just like a cancellation. If you only want to apply it to certain types of people, residents, non residents, maybe you're only giving a discount to residents, that's a way of kind of grouping them together and say only apply this change to residents or nonresidents, I'm gonna leave it blank, because I'm going to do all in this case, you have to be aware that we are at a refund apply or finance situation again, because I'm decreasing my fees, these customers still paid the full amount. So the difference would be put as a credit on my household as kind of, you know, the advantage of getting out of this section early because it was cancelled or changed in some way. So just you know, keep in mind, same sort of idea here, do we want to do refund finance or refund apply, give a credit or get a quick check, cut.
And then do we want to email the receipt. And then we also have this Toggle here apply refund to existing module balance and what this Toggle is going to do. If let's say creates me a $50 credit balance, it's going to keep it in the activity module. That way, if they ever tried to use that money, that module credit again, they would have to pay it back in using another activity. If you're not really concerned with you know where that credit sits, you can just Toggle that right off. And they can use that credit for anything else in the system that they buy. probably recommend that route. Unless that's something that you guys have decided is kind of your business practice for this. And just I guess depends on a little bit how flexible you want to be with your patrons.
So again, now at the bottom, if you want to change your transaction Username to cash drawer or the Transaction Date, you're welcome to do so here. But when I'm ready to process, always look over your work one time just to make sure that you're setting things right, so I'm going down by 50 for both of these fees. And at the bottom here, I can just come down here and Click process continue. Alright, so that's gonna run for just a few seconds. And then when that completes, my fees for these households would be adjusted. And so that they would be have new rates. So if I go back to Doc center, we'll just take a look at one of those receipts, for example.
So we had two enrollments here, basically, their fees were decreased by $50. And says, there were two of them that resulted in $100 Credit Balance put on their household. So that's just a good way of, you know, adjusting fees in bulk for an entire activity section. So that's pretty much it on that. Any questions on that front?
Zach Malloch 19:13
Yeah. So this is kind of a question about the whole thing, but what happens if they use a scholarship for part of that payment.
Joe Chevalier 19:21
So if it was a scholarship for part of the payment, basically, it would take that scholarship payment and still apply it as a credit if we were really refunding that that entire amount, and it would just be put on the household like a credit would be. It doesn't really discriminate across pay codes. So if any of you have the same question for any Type of pay code, it would put it as a credit it would not return it as more scholarship for them on the household. Right.
Zach Malloch 19:48
So we kind of get around some of the the we were doing a lot by being a little bit dumber, I guess, with the logic we're not going through and allowing all those individual All choices and selections, because that would need to be an individual cancellation most likely at that point.
Joe Chevalier 20:07
Yep, so yeah, we are somewhat limited with these functionalities that you know, the things you wouldn't normally do. But it is kind of the advantage to doing roster fee changes that you can do them in bulk. But the disadvantages, you know, you lose some of that flexibility that you have on payment screens and whatnot. So,
Zach Malloch 20:24
so Suellen was asking if fees are linked above the section level, doing that bulk refunds still send the refunds?
Joe Chevalier 20:31
Yep, no matter where you link, your fees, won't make a difference. It's always just going to look at whatever fees that were charged to the patron. So it won't necessarily be so much on the, you know, this, that Screen there. So right on the roster fee change, you know, it's it's basically going to show you any fees that you had linked to the activity at any level, that's why you're seeing some some that I really didn't have in play when I enrolled, because they were linked at like Type levels, etc. So any, any way you link the fees should be fine and the process should be the same.
Zach Malloch 21:08
Yeah. And unfortunately, yes, the questions keep coming up about the comments. Unfortunately, in the bulk cancellation processes, we don't have any way to put a comment code on the receipt. So there's no receipt notes. There's not an easy way to follow that. So, you know, I guess I would recommend either, if you're wanting to save some time, by using some of the bulk options, just kind of remember the the time and date range that these were happening. And then if anybody has questions later on, we'd have them there. I don't think that we would necessarily be able to get any Type of code changes to allow for comments. At the time, it would be very useful for the situation, but we can certainly have that in place for the future.
Joe Chevalier 21:49
So they're looking for cancellation codes on the I think we may actually be able to do that if we add a cancellation code question to the activity module. I think that if we just try this real quick here,
Zach Malloch 22:04
and let's find out.
Joe Chevalier 22:06
And this might be something I actually have to create here, because I don't have one set up.
Zach Malloch 22:12
Right. So while Joe is doing that, you'll see class codes, partial preparations kind of talked about some that many learning how to cancel hundreds of items and track how much revenue you are losing. So we can definitely get some of that with your financial reports, cash, GL, sort of stuff. cancellations are tracked separately, activity. Bottom line report will show that your activity evaluations that trend analysis comparing on the year against the other, we have multiple module trend analyses that can work for some of that.
Joe Chevalier 22:52
Alright, just circle back to the cancellation reason maybe I misspoke earlier, but I was just maybe just not quite understanding. But on the cancellation process. If you don't see a cancellation reason or a cancellation code coming up on the Screen, it means that you don't have a question prompted during the cancellation process. Usually a cancellation code and reason are linked at the module level, meaning they applied to any cancellations within a module. So from the start, I didn't have any cancellation questions. But what I did was I went to the activity module here. And basically on the Questions tab, I added this cancellation reason here. And this cancellation reason, basically, on the question setup itself, we have kind of a function of cancellation reasons. So if you link a question of cancellation reason, or a second one of cancellation code, those will show up on the cancellation process. And you will just have to basically enter in whatever you want. It's going to be you know, one cancellation reason for everybody. But it does give you the option. So if you get to the cancel Screen, and you don't have a cancellation reason or cancellation code, that is something that you're going to have to add as a question to the entire module, whether that's the activity module or the SA module, which is all modules, it is something you're going to want to put on there if you need that. So if you have any questions with that you guys can contact support with getting those questions on there. But it's really, really quite quite easy to just add the cancellation reason using the function of cancellation reason for cancellation code.
Zach Malloch 24:38
Alright, so lots of things coming in. So, question about the credit cards. So a couple of people have asked this and just to double check, Joe, but if people want to refund people to their cards, that's going to be an individual process.
Joe Chevalier 24:52
Yeah, it will be an individual process or you could do refund apply and then go take that credit after you process the cancel They should go to those specific households that need it. And then we could refund now, just by doing a basic refund of the credit balance. For example, here, if I go into global sales, I know I know I canceled someone earlier and put a credit balance on their household. So I know that I cancelled Jack Black here. So if I go to his household, it's going to tell me that he has a credit balance of $205. So if this were a scenario where he canceled and now we're trying to refund this, as you know, credit card. In this particular case, I didn't actually paying with credit card because I paid with cash but so I don't have a link back to a card. But I could come in here and say use refund credit. And then I could just refund this credit that was created as a product of this cancellation, refund selected credits, and then you'd basically just say how you want to refund it. So from this point, you could do refund now to any of your regular old paycodes. You know, I could even take right out of the till and give him cash back if that was something you guys were, you know, doing for this virus so I could refund his sale right then and there. And if you had a card, I could have selected the credit card. All right. I see some questions maybe about what other modules you can do kind of bulk cancellations in somewhat limited and that the ones that we can do, we can do them in as activity. League cancellations if you are doing like a team registration. So if you're doing roster upload, it gets a little trickier because you're not canceling those teams and refunding like one person for a softball league as the coach kind of gets all that money back. It does, you know, it would be more of a manual process if you're doing a roster upload. But if you do have team registrations, you can do a bulk cancellation. In the league module, we also can do it for tickets, and pretty much any module that you are going to do this on. It's all very similar stuff. So for example, and POS ticket here to get in. You know, if I select a basketball game here, for example, I can come here and say canceled ticket, and all the screens are going to come to a very similar landing Screen, how do you want to refund it refund now or sorry, refund apply or refund finance, usually some unique settings to the module, do you want to apply it to the ticket, your credit balance to the ticket module. So you can only use it to buy more tickets? Do you want to change the status to inactive, so just some random settings in there. If you ever wondering what a setting does, you can refer to the little i here for some informational help. If you don't see this little i bubble, for those of you that don't know, in the new UI, under the support Button down here, you can enable in app help. And that's going to turn on these little informational bubbles. So you can see it's off here. And I don't have the help. But when I turn that on, I will see the help. So especially on these utilities that you guys never use very often. Good to just double check yourself, read the help quickly takes you know, 15 seconds, and that might buy you hours of times and making a mistake. So just important thing to remember there that you can, in fact, just use the help to kind of understand these fields. The only other module that we really have a bulk cancellation for his Trips, and Trips would bring you to you know, a very similar Screen as well here. So if I pop open trip management, any one of these Trips here, I could cancel just by going here and saying canceled trip, which brings me to get again another identical Screen where I can apply money differently. So that's really your only options with bulk cancellations. So to go over that, again, activities, leagues if you're doing team registrations, tickets and Trips.
Zach Malloch 29:13
And but we do have some nice utilities for let's say, passes, that's been one of the ones that's coming up quite a bit.
Joe Chevalier 29:18
So a lot of a lot of conversation lately and been around
Zach Malloch 29:22
actually sorry, I just set you off there, Joe. But just to let everybody know, the question came up. Is this going to be posted? Yes, this recording will be posted at the end of this session. Hopefully by the end of the day, definitely by the morning tomorrow, in the RecChat archives with everything else. We're keeping all the questions trying to keep up with them as they're coming in. We'll answer those and respond with the doc that might come a little bit later. But yes, we will have this all available afterwards. It is 330. We're going to keep going. So as long as you guys have questions, we'll keep going with some of that. Including pass
Joe Chevalier 29:55
numbers together, bringing it into Pass Management so a lot of you have shut down you'll or fitness centers? And you're starting the process of well, how are we going to deal with giving these people they're a lot of time, you know, they've paid for this much time and we've shut down the gym. So how can we still meet their expectations in terms of their their memberships. So in Pass Management, basically, what you can do here is under the option more, there's some different utilities we can use. So the biggest one here is membership, bulk change, this is what you're going to use to extend or reduce membership dates here. So if I pop up in membership, bulk change, this isn't something that's very easy to train on, where I can be like, This is how it exactly works. Because each of you handle your passes very differently, and how you do dates. Some of you do fixed dates, some of them, it's, you know, a year out from when you buy it. So keep in mind, you know, there's a number of variables that go into this. So if what I'm saying doesn't always make entirely sense for you guys, and made me because it doesn't, but I hopefully I can touch on kind of each scenario here. So when the Screen pops up, basically, the first thing is, you know, what passes are we touching, you know, if it's every pass in your system is going to be increased by let's say, a month for now, who knows how long it will be, but let's say a month, I can say use pass range of blank to Z ZZ, which will run for all passes, which would be essentially the same as coming over here and selecting all my passes by saying select all rows. So you can either do a range of passes of everything, or you know, a specific range. Or you can just use over here to just select the passes that you want. So I'm going to clear my selected here. In this case, here, I have a pass here, that's called installment billing pass, something I've set up just for testing installment billing. Over on the right hand side, basically, you have to choose whether you're looking at a person's expiration date, or just any amount of time that they have on the pass. So in this case, usually we're not extending so much people's expiration day as much as we're adding one month on to the expiration date. So you could say if they expire between this time range of you know, let's say March 1, to march 31, you know, we could say that, and basically, if your past is set to expire some day in March, we could extend it or something along that line. More common right now, people are using the membership date option, and they're saying, if your membership is active between any of these dates, we're going to increase your membership date range by X number of days, or set it to a new fixed value of date. So in this case, I'm going to say if your past is active between any of these days. And then you could also say, of a of a specific group of past numbers, which I don't think a lot of you will do. You also might want to say if your past might be future, because it hasn't started yet. So let's say your past starts on the 15th. That would mean that your past is, you know, future. The other consideration is if my past expired, let's say yesterday, and I'm doing this today, but I want that included, you may consider it's including expired on here as well. So just kind of look through the list here and make sure that you know the status is you're including kind of make sense for kind of where you guys are at in terms of your passes and what you're trying to do this. So I'm going to include all three statuses for my case. And then down here is where I basically decide what I'm going to do to these past dates. Basically, if you choose new new expiry date or new member date, it's going to actually be looking for a physical date that will become their new date. So if your past structure is, you know, it's good for one year, up until you know, or starting on when you bought it to, you know, one year out, this option probably won't work for you. But if let's say it's a pool pass or something like that, that usually ends on September 1, and you guys have decided that you're going to be pushing back to September 31 provided the weather works out. That's maybe when you would use an actual physical member date range. So for this case, here, I would probably just say, you know, extend expired day range or reduce expired day range probably wouldn't be making sense in this timeframe, but from
Zach Malloch 34:37
most of what I've heard from people extending it, so if you're gonna be closed for two weeks, extend the expiration and then at the bottom, you have number of days, so you can just Type in 14 and then everybody gets an extra 14 days on their membership to cover the two weeks are closed. Yep, just
Joe Chevalier 34:53
like Zack said if you're closed for 14 days and that's the kind of increase you want to see. Just pop that in there number of days 14 And I realized that with all the unknown around the virus, it could be something that you're doing more than once, you know, you guys might start out extending two weeks, and then two weeks passes, we're still in the same boat or worse, and you might need to go basically increase this again. So you would do pretty much the same process, except the you know, the new number of days would be kind of your next extension period. So it'd be good before you guys use this to kind of come up with an internal plan about how you're going to handle membership dates. A lot of times, we get calls in support where, you know, maybe users aren't sure what their policy is, yes. So in, you know, support can help you make those decisions. But it's also good for you guys to come up to those decisions internally. So that we can make the system work for whatever you need. So just keep that in mind as moving forward is to try to weigh out these kinds of things before calling support so that we can kind of give you the really specific answers you're looking for. So basically, I would be extending any pass that has any activeness, between March 1 and march 31. Year, and then it's just as simple as clicking process. And it's basically going to go out and extend anybody's pass within that date range for 14 days. So anyone that had that pass now has their pass extended two weeks. Any questions on kind of this utility and what it can do?
Zach Malloch 36:33
We had a couple of questions with some of these, not as much specifically answered a couple of questions about the passes as we were doing. So, unfortunately, Facility Reservation is we don't have any bulk options for canceling facility or Rental reservations, unfortunately. So I'm going to clear some of those had a couple of questions. So a couple of questions about going back to activity fees. And if you use the Bulk cancellation on a childcare class, or by day, you know, my class and they have installment billing. How does that play Joe?
Joe Chevalier 37:14
So let's see here, if we pop back into section management,
Zach Malloch 37:19
and kind of tied to that if use the roster fee change, would that affect installment billing, or I think you have another thing you're going to be showing us?
Joe Chevalier 37:26
Yeah, here. So let's see, I don't know if I have a true and childcare class set up here. But as you can see, we don't have any kind of ability to decide on what fees are refunded. So in a childcare, basically, it's going to refund them what they've paid. So if you've paid $500, it is going to try to cancel and basically put that back on their household. So that's one consideration with childcare. Is this going to work for you? Do you are you wanting to keep so much of that money. So that's just one thing to consider there is that with with childcare, it's going to refund you what you've paid into the class. Because this is usually kind of designed for disasters where, you know, you kind of messed up now we're going to be refunding everybody, because the entire classes canceled. So in this case, you don't have a lot of flexibility with that. So really, it's going to come down to you know, how do they need to be refunded? And if this isn't going to work for you, you're going to be stuck kind of in global sales using purchase history that gives you that flexibility.
Zach Malloch 38:45
Although I do see, we can revise one of our answers from before we have a cancellation reason. And I believe that was from linking your cancellation question.
Joe Chevalier 38:53
Yep. That was when we liked that module question there for the cancelation reason. So that is something we can do it just wasn't set up by default. And whether or not you'll see that question is purely a database thing, you know, you guys could all vary in terms of if you see that or not, but you've definitely all have the potential of seeing it as long as you have the right question on the module level.
Zach Malloch 39:18
Right. Can you bulk fee reduction, do a fee reduction on a child care class before doing that cancellation?
Joe Chevalier 39:25
Yeah, you can. Basically, there's a scenario that we'll talk about is if, let's say you want to change the fees and then cancel the section, but the change in the fees would handle kind of the refund side of it. There's kind of another option here is if we do a roster fee change on this activity. This is the same class I already did the roster refund for but basically, let's say I wanted to only refund everyone $50 What you could do is To decrease everyone's fees by $50, using your roster fee change utility, then you could go back to the activity section management data grid. And rather than going through the cancel process here, where I cancel section, I could just switch this section status here, to cancelled. And what that would do is basically everyone would have gotten refunded their $50. And it canceled the section. So you know, that would pretty much handle a scenario where you're trying to refund only a certain amount, and then still have the class be cancelled without refunding the full
Zach Malloch 40:37
enrollees are still enrolled in the class,
Joe Chevalier 40:39
right.
Zach Malloch 40:39
It's a canceled class, except that they charged at a reduced rate for
Joe Chevalier 40:43
yes, yeah, that's kind of our only workaround to manipulating fees would the cancellation process still happening is you can adjust fees using roster fee change to get, you know, not a full refund, but only a partial refund. And then from there, you can just change your section status to cancelled, which is kind of just another way of kind of doing the same thing there.
Zach Malloch 41:07
All right. And we do have a couple of questions about installment billing coming up right now. Sure. So I'll just go ahead and ask all three that I see right now. And then we can go from that point. So when extending with your extending the expiration date, yep. Does that automatically do anything for the installment billing in the past?
Joe Chevalier 41:24
I don't think that that would play a factor would the billing just purely adding two weeks, I think it might depend a little bit on your billing structure and how that was built out. But no, it shouldn't really have any effect on your billing, it's kind of, it's kind of assumed a pro bono extension is just going to make your end date a little bit longer. So if you need to add bills to that, that would be a matter of you going to those households, and you know, manually adding a bill but
Zach Malloch 41:55
right and so. So on the other side of installment billing, can you bulk change the status of a unbilled record to something
Joe Chevalier 42:05
absolutely is a very important piece of billing with a situation like this is on top of extending people's dates, you also don't want to Build them for a month they didn't receive. So we have a utility called bulk installment billing change. That's one of the period end programs. But what this gives us the flexibility to do is basically, literally change a billing status from something from unbilled to maybe suspended. And or literally change the fee amounts for the billing. I'm gonna pull up a household. So we have a good example to look at here. So I'm gonna go to household management, where you can see someone's billing. And then Cullen Barber here has a pass with billing here. So his past started, I think in in March or something or February, his first bill would be on April 1 here. So let's say we know that this one is something we don't want to bill for, how do we suspend it? Well, you know, manually, we could just come in here and say, you know, it's unbilled, I can suspend it or something along that line, which is good. But with that said, now you have to go manually do maybe 200 people's passes or more, so not a great option if you're doing them in bulk. So we'll switch this back to unbilled. What this utility is designed to do is basically do the hard work for you here. So the first step is finding the fees on the pass that you're hoping to effect. So these are this is literally a data grid of installment BS, estimate billing fees set up in your system. So on the right, you're going to have a parent code. So you can actually find, you know, your your pass here. So I know that this is the reoccurring billing amount of 75. Because I know it's tied to this pass that I sold Cullen Barber called IV pass. So just by using the parent code, that's basically saying, you know, where's that fee link to so this would be your passcode. So I found my fee, and then you know, if I want to add it, I can add it here. And basically, I've just added this fee. And then from here, you can actually, you know, change the amount. So, you know, if each bill is usually $75. I could, you know, discount that $20 If I wanted to decrease a certain month, or I could just leave it as zero. And what I can do down here is say for bills that happen between this day and the bill that the bill day is referencing is literally this bill day here. So my bill day is 4/1 so if I want to suspend all 4/1 bills, I would go back to my installment billing change. I would literally select you know, 4/1 as my date. So it's like 4/1 to 4/1 would just be the date of 4/1. I'm going to include unbilled here, you could do Toggle ones you don't want for a reason here. And then I want to Toggle this on suspend or resume billing. So reinstate billing so and then I also want to print the update log here. And then there's an option right here, but something in my way, basically, what Type of bills we want to affect here. So in this case, we want to do all unbilled, or we want to do just the selected ones. So if I do selected one, it's only going to look at this particular bill. But if you don't want to get you know, all, particularly with the fees, and the amounts aren't changing, you can just remove that. And you can say for, you know, all these passes blank to, you know, my last pass for just pass memberships, I want to suspend only the selected or in this case, all unbilled, so it's going to look for any passes with billing between, you know, on the first and it's going to suspend them. So I'm going to hit process here. And that's gonna run so give us some time to run if you have, you know, a lot of household and billing. So this is going to basically pop up a log, and basically tell you, you know, these are your old amounts charged, this is your new amount, in my case, I didn't touch the fees, so those stay at zero. But from here, if I pull those out of here, and go back to this household, and refresh, you can see this for one bill is now suspended. So if you ever wanted to get that back as unsuspended, or you made a mistake, you could run the inverse of this, and you could say, reinstate all suspended fees process. And this will put this bill kind of back in the unbuilt state here. And that was doing it in bulk for multiple households. So
a lot of people have been suspending bills, not so much decreasing them. But if you are in a scenario where you just want to decrease a month, just search the fee that's tied to the pass. And you can use the pass code here to find that, Click Add fee, and then just basically say your new amounts that you're charging, might recommend you do a discount so that you can kind of track those discounts historically moving forward. Because I'm sure obviously, a lot of you are losing revenue. So it'd be good to kind of see what sort of revenue you might be losing on this scenario. So
Zach Malloch 47:37
yeah, all right. So let's see if we can catch up with some of these questions, again, trying to do what we can, we'll do the ones that have received a vote first, and then we'll try to go just an order. So Tracy, you had asked us a little bit earlier, you had six weeks sessions based on classes that only have a few days canceled. So you'd probably want to do that roster fee, change utility first, and then do and then just change the pass the class status to cancelled? That way, you can be much more specific with how much money you're giving back. You don't have to do with the all or nothing that the normal cancellations will do. This is a good question. I would guess, possibly not Joe. But if there's a special reform refund form, I'm guessing a receipt document that prints along with the refund receipt, if you do the bulk cancellation, will that form print? In addition to that?
Joe Chevalier 48:28
I don't think I don't think it would in that case. Yeah, I think that's just going to be the receipt. Bulk print is pretty much designed to only print receipts. So in those cases, I think you might, you might be better off printing out that cancellation form X number of times. And when you hand out receipts, just give that along with it. But at this time, you know, there's there's not really something like that. But, you know, we're also in kind of uncharted territories with kind of the software ever having to handle anything like this is kind of a first time for us. So, you know, be be thinking about, like, you know, if this was in the best interests, you know, maybe some enhancement requests will come of this, about how we handle certain things. And we can get some enhancement requests written up for some utilities that are kind of not fully developed. So you know, while we are limited, you know, keep that in mind is it's kind of uncharted territory for us as well. So if there's things that aren't working for you guys, you know, let us know about how it could be better so that we can, you know, maybe making improvements to these utilities.
Zach Malloch 49:32
And so, a couple of questions, we are going to try to keep to the end of our list here we are going to get to RecConnect so that you guys can then send out messages to your customers to let them know what's going on here. So a lot of the other questions are getting a little bit more specific into particular fees and exactly how we would do that. So Alaska, Nick and Robert and Colin to keep answering as many of those as they can And we'll get through some of the RecConnect. We'll switch over to my laptop, we'll go very quickly through 10.3, just to show some of these analogs between the two systems. And then we'll check to see where we are with questions and the like after that.
Joe Chevalier 50:13
Sure. Yeah, so like Zack said, to go along with this, when we're doing bulk changes, it's good to do bulk emailing so that people know what's happening. And you're transparent about them with, you know, money that they've really given you guys. So when you're starting with RecConnect, next, I suggest opening up report output listing as kind of your first place. If you're in the new UI recommends starting this, this is a good option. report output listing has every report in the system, categorized by module so you don't know what report you're looking for just in general, this is a good place to go to start, you can highlight the report, get a screenshot of what it will look like if you ran it. So you can kind of if you don't know what you're looking for, it's a good spot to live. But when you come in here, if you just Type the word rec, and hit enter or search, it's going to filter down to every, you know, report we have with the name rec, and you will find that these are all called RecConnect. So there's different ones per module. And basically, how you choosing which RecConnect you're going to run is based off what types of people you're trying to reach out to, are you trying to reach out to a list of people enrolled in a program to comments cancelled? Or are you looking to email everyone in your database to say, hey, are our entire department is now closed, you know, we'll be updating you and we have more info. So you know, it's kind of kind of depends a little bit about who you're trying to reach out to. The most common one we see as an activity RecConnect or, you know, like a membership RecConnect. For current members. I'll just touch on a couple of these, you know, activity RecConnect being a good one. Basically, we're going to highlight that and Click Run Report, you'll get a little template Screen, you can just say continue, unless you have a template to select. This is going to bring you to a basic report Screen just like you would normally run for activity roster. And the important thing here is who basically is going to be included in this RecConnect. So basically, what you can do is select you know, a few classes that you know, let's say these classes here, I'm trying to reach out to them about this, you know, cancellation, select your activities don't don't get, you know, worried about all these criteria. This is just ways to filter down from a bigger list. What you'll do is Click process, and it's going to bring you up somewhat of a landing Screen here, where really the only consideration is do you want to do all matches unique family members or unique households. And the difference between these options are basically saying if I have kids enrolled in two of the same sections that I'm including on a report, do I want to email them twice, or maybe just one. So oftentimes, people will do just unique households here. And then you can, you know, even try to say, of these households, I only want to include these certain demographic. But in our case, usually I'll just be doing unique households and hit continue. This is what it's going to do, it's going to go to the server and it's going to fetch everyone enrolled into those classes. And then it's going to pop up a little notification here on the right, saying, Hey, we found your results. So I'm going to Click on show results. And this is going to bring me to my emailing Screen here. So under my options here, I have emails, labels or letters. Most cases, we're doing emails, you may find labels and letters are needed if there's people without email addresses. But you know, most people have email addresses these days. Zoom out here, you get a better look at this. Basically, on this Screen is kind of fill in the blanks, and it's pretty self explanatory, you know, who's the email gonna come from. So in my case, it would be coming from me. Do you want to add like a friendly name, so it kind of masks your email and would say Joe's friendly name or something like that. What would be your email subject. So you know, in this case, probably something related to the virus.
And then down here if you want to cc yourself. But then here is basically where you're going to be typing your email. So this would be your email body, just typed out the way you want it. What I will recommend what I find a lot of people are doing these days as they write the email and word and then they do a copy and paste right into the recognize Screen. I'm going to recommend you guys don't do that process for now. What's happening with that is the word is putting a lot of HTML coding in the background behind what you're typing that you don't see. And when you paste that in here, it doesn't really always completely jive with our programming. So if you're going to be typing an email, I would suggest either typing it in Notepad or typing it right in this email body editor, we do have editors, tools to mean you know, format and whatnot. So I highly suggest you write your email here, if you want to keep, you know, copy out and review it in Word great, but you know, do your editing and changing right in here where we've coded the system to work correctly, that way you don't, you know, send out an email that looks one way and it gets received another. So one thing you can do, if you want to make the email a little more personable is add system tags. So, you know, normally, you would just say, Hello, participant, if you want to actually fill the person whose name you're emailing them, you could actually come in here and say, you know, household name, household last name, for example. And when you add that system tag, it's going to actually pre fill the person's name and the email. So if I'm emailing Joe Chevalier value, it would say, email body, Joe Chevalier about it, not actually just a generic Hello patron sort of it was. So you can personalize using these dynamic tags that can fill in, you know, activities, Section names, etc. So that can be something you can do to kind of enhance your emails. And pretty much you could attach files, other receipt documents, and just some really random settings that might pertain to the way you want to send the email out. But again, I would just refer to the help because they're all very unique and and who you want to email to so.
Zach Malloch 56:28
So quick question about emails, Joe. If you're sending out mass cancellation emails, yeah, how do you keep yourself from getting flagged as spam?
Joe Chevalier 56:36
That's a good question. When you're sending out mass cancellation emails, it can be hard to actually prevent yourself from being flagged as spam. And you can only do so much to prevent that. You know, the big the big thing is sometimes your IT needs to actually qualify your email with a service provider like Gmail, like for example, if I send out 5000 emails, from this address to Gmail account, sometimes Gmail is like, hey, this sender might be a flag, you know, spammer and you can actually qualify certain email addresses with spammers. But oftentimes, there's not a whole lot you can do other than kind of tracking individual emails and saying, why did this get flagged as spam with your email server, and then from there making tweaks to prevent things like that. But again, it is does, it's a tough thing to do. And you can't always guarantee when you're emailing that it's not going to be flagged as spam. But always good to be checking with your patrons just to make sure they are getting emails, when you can, I know, it's not always readily available information, but not not a whole lot, we can really control over what's flagged as spam and what's not, because often that's really dependent on the receiver. So if they use a weird Email Setup, and we send them something it doesn't like, it's not always something we can do for those people. But it is something to keep in mind.
Zach Malloch 58:05
So one thing you can potentially do is in your email queue, it's a scheduled event that you have in your database, you can set the number of seconds that it will try to send you emails for, and you know, it can send a lot of emails in a very short amount of time in which round numbers so 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, etc. That might be a way to if you're concerned about how fast things are sending out you can do 10 seconds every minute rather than trying to do a full 60 seconds of sending to get everything out there.
Joe Chevalier 58:34
This was Zack was talking about here is this this email seconds here, you could decrease or increase this number. Basically, if the smaller the number, the smaller batches of emails that will get sent out. So just keep that in mind. If if it seems like it's getting flagged as spam, because 7000 emails are going out all at once. Maybe it's something we can do here where we throttle back how often so that they'll go out slower, but you know, will be still happening.
Zach Malloch 59:08
Absolutely. Alright, so hopefully that helps out with that question Mickey. Gina is asking about using the old UI. Sure. And looking for bulk installment billing change. That's just under System Management, correct?
Joe Chevalier 59:21
Yep. So I think I have old database here. I can pull up real quick.
Zach Malloch 59:27
While Joe was doing that, Alan, you had the question, would you like would you have to change the fee back to the original and annually in the future? If you've just the fee before canceling the class? I think if the class got cancelled, then we would lose some of that roster bulk fee Change option.
Joe Chevalier 59:45
But what was the question if we want to do it after the fact?
Zach Malloch 59:48
Would you have to change the feed back to the original fee manually in the future if you're just the fee before canceling class? So actually, Alan, if you're asking you about the fee attached to the activity section itself, the roster fee change, I don't believe changes the fee as it's linked to the activity. This is just the fee that was charged to these individual customers that are signed up for that class. So you shouldn't have to worry about changing it for next season. If you have enrollees. Hopefully we won't run into this sort of thing again, next season. See other questions coming through? Stacy, do you have to calculate the fee decrease differently if your fee is based on a per class fee? So yes, if it is a per class fee, and you're adjusting that fee, you'd want to reduce it by the amount, that would be multiplied per class entrance to get that reduction. Correct, Joe?
Joe Chevalier 1:00:41
Yes.
Zach Malloch 1:00:41
So checking out our let's see bulk cancel daycare sections, where that one might have just been answered. Nope, nope. Sorry, join. Wait, what about bulk refunds for childcare daily activities for multiple days in sections? So I'm guessing that's once again, as per day enrollment sort of stuff?
Joe Chevalier 1:01:04
Yeah, yep, still a little limited. And you know, the flexibility on those ones for cancellation is going to cancel the entire class and refund all the money paid. So if that doesn't work for your scenario, it will be a scenario where you have to go to purchase history for all the enrollments and kind of decrease them from there, manually update them. To touch for Gina's question she was looking for, I think both customer billing change in the old UI for those of us in the old UI that's under System Management, which will bring up kind of our master list here. And then down at the bottom, we have period end processing, and we have focused on billing change right down here. So this is going to bring up the exact same Screen and just kind of a different looking view. So all the all the same.
Zach Malloch 1:01:52
Right? And so we did get a question about SMS. So SMS is built into the RecConnect options. It had previously been hosted only Cullen, I asked maybe if you could jump in there. Actually, I don't know if he's, I think he had to jump out he had a meeting at four o'clock. So anybody that's interested in SMS, if you're an on premise customer, it is now available to you just leave a note or email sales@vermontsystems.com. And they can get that information to you. That basically just lets you send direct connect directly to people's cell phones from a phone number rather than the old like text message as an email thing that we used to do. So it's a little bit nicer to do that.
Joe Chevalier 1:02:39
Just a note on that. It seems like a really great idea for everyone. You know, when you first hear you saying, Yeah, that sounds awesome. There are some fees that go along with you know, like protects. And then on top of that, each customer that wants to be texted does need to physically log into WebTrac and enable the function for themselves. So just by turning it on doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to text everyone in your system. Just keep that in mind is that each patron needs to kind of opt into that emailing feature. So
Zach Malloch 1:03:11
all right. So then Anastasia is asking about how to cancel people or allow people to cancel themselves online, that one I think is going to get a little bit beyond what we have time to. Joe We're in the middle of about to show?
Joe Chevalier 1:03:26
I was going to show one more thing on the RecConnect. Just to to that question. Canceling online is kind of an involved process, because the system from the get go, whether you're a new install or migration, we do all our efforts to prevent that from happening. So there are changes in several different profiles, your WebTrac menu. And then, you know, usually some verbiage to kind of standardize the process. So if there's anyone that's looking to allow cancellations online, you're probably better off kind of flowing through support. And we can kind of help you make those decisions, right so that you set it up the way you want. One thing I really just wanted to show because it's been something I've gotten a lot of requests on, I showed you guys how to run an activity RecConnect. But Down Under System misc. There's some other RecConnect options here that are good to know about. Primarily, you'll see they all have the same name, but different tables. So as a billing detail is a way to reach out to people with billing as a person is a way to reach out to individuals. And then essay household is basically a way to reach out to one email per every household in your system. So if you're trying to send out an email to everyone in the system, use this household RecConnect. And then you can just basically run this for all households by toggling on use household number range. And this will ensure that everyone in your your basically your system gets an email when you do the RecConnect.
Zach Malloch 1:04:51
And one of the questions was, can you send RecConnect in multiple forms at the same time? The answer to that is yes. If you would just include the the multiple options at the top of that RecConnect results, you have email, you have the letter and you have the label. And if you have the SMS, you could do all four of those, or any combination of those at the same time. So, what we're going to do is I think we will need to start to wrap up here, I have a version of 10.3 on my desktop. So I'm going to ask Joe to stop sharing, and then I will share mine. And so this is just going to be very quickly. But if you are going to cancel your activities, and sorry, I'm probably going to have to go back and forth on a little bit rusty with 10.3. So think it's actually files activity. And then we have man, it's been forever since I've been here, maybe it's a daily processing Type of thing. Yeah, so activity cancellations all that's the one that we're looking for. So this will let you pick an activity section, it will give you the option of doing your different refunds your user ID, changing the class to be stamped, cancelled. So same options that you have, you actually have a little bit of this refund now option here. So 10.3 does have that capability built check the help for that. I also wanted to go to utilities, and show you under pass that we have our let's see pass membership date change, this one has that same option, you can extend your expiration range and add as many days as you want to, to any passes within your range. And then we do have our RecConnect in the various reports. So under each of the module labels, you're going to have RecConnect as a drop down, and then from that you have a couple of different options for most of them. And then you can do your bulk communication with everybody. So let's see that looks like 108 questions through the course of this, we had over 200 people join into it, we are over an hour in our session. And I think that we are going to call it there. We've tracked all the questions that have been asked where we track the answers that we've given so far, we'll go back and we'll extend and expand upon those where necessary. And that will be distributed. Also, as I said, this will be posted on to the RecChat archive. Towards the end of the by the end of the day tomorrow. That follow up response doc will hopefully be there before the end of the week. Week. VSI is starting our own work from home tomorrow. So I know that question came up earlier about social distancing. We're doing our part, starting tomorrow and going indefinitely until probably at least April 6. We'll be working from home and answering you via teams and remote chat and all that sort of stuff. So bear with us as we go through this. Thank you all for participating and RecChat with us. We will be here on Thursday. Well, not here. But we'll be in RecChat on Thursday to talk about the Next Gen UI stuff a bit more as well. Thank you all for joining us, Joe. Thank you for joining us, Nick. And Robert, thank you very much for joining us online calling Leigha. appreciate everybody coming in really quickly to make this happen at the last minute. Thank you all so much. Stay safe out there and talk to you soon.
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