Tips and Tricks for a Successful Contract Season: Part 1

Contract season can be a hectic time for many schools. Not only is it hugely important, but there’s a lot of elements, settings, and things to keep in mind. To help smooth out this season, we’re providing some things to watch out for, double check, and other tips to hopefully help you avoid a call to support.

For part 1, we’re taking a look more at the setup side of contracts. Fear not though, we’ll have a couple more of these tips and tricks style blogs as the season progresses, so keep an eye out for more early in 2022.

Things to Consider

Before you get started, remember that you can only have one contract per type per year. In addition, you’ll want to double check that your students have an entering year or enrollment row for that year.

While this blog won’t be going over the overall contract creation process, we do have plenty of online help and creation steps you can find right here.

The biggest thing to note during contract season is to not wait until the last minute. We recommend having your specific contracts ready to go weeks in advance. You’ll also want to create a test user to run through the process to make sure everything works as expected. We also recommend running through it with a faculty member, and then a small group of parents. Practice makes perfect.

Preparing, Set Up, and Verifying Data

Data is one of the bigger stumbling blocks with contracts, especially is something is overlooked or incorrectly listed. First thing to do is to check your users.

• Make sure to remove or merge duplicates.
• Double check their entering year and grade is correct.

Another source of frustration can come from family details, especially if something has changed. Family status is a field that should be verified especially if something has changed such as divorce, remarry, etc.

Communication is key, we highly recommend that you reach out to your responsible signers and let them know what they will be expected to complete and by when. The more communication that can be done, the better, so don’t rely on one source of communication. A variety of ways for contacting responsible signers like Notifications or PushPages is the best thing to do.

Remember, setup issues now will likely lead to bigger issues in January and February when parents get their hands on things. Making sure your settings and data are accurate now will save you time and effort later.

The big take away when approaching the start of contract season is to verify data and verify your information.

Let’s Talk Integrated Contracts

For those of you using integrated contracts with Blackbaud Tuition Management, verify that both the billing information and settings are correct in both the Blackbaud Tuition Management and Blackbaud Enrollment Management System products.

Also, verify that you don’t have any missing information such as tuition details or payment plans.

Decisions, Decisions

Part of the setup is making decisions on certain options that families will face. For example, if you have a deadline set for the first payment being due on a certain date, does that mean families can still select the contract after the deadline has passed or will it be expired?

These are the types of things that should be considered when setting up contracts which will prevent more than a few headaches later on.
As I mentioned above, we have plenty of additional resources to help you this Contract Season. If you want more information, please visit our online help center, blog post showing off recent additions to Contracts, or check out our Enrollment Contract Overview Webinar.

We hope these tips help lead you to a successful contract season, but of course, if you get stuck or run into a major issue, definitely reach out to our support team for assistance. Good luck and make sure your subscribed to the blog to stay up to date on when the next parts of our Contract Season Tip Guides arrive. See you then!