Tips and Tricks for a Successful Contract Season: Part 3

The final part in the Contract Season Tips and Tricks series is here! At this point in the season, it’s all about troubleshooting to ensure a smooth experience. Today’s blog is going to dive into some common questions and issues.We certainly hope your contract season is going smoothly to this point and that the previous instalments in this series have come in handy. In case you missed it, check out part 1 for setup details and part 2 for tips on better communication.



Today’s final part focuses on the troubleshooting process. While every situation is different, there are some common themes that support comes across each year including bad data causing issues. Hopefully, we’ll not only shed some light on these problems, but potentially help you solve issues as well.



Standard Contract Common Issues



“Error Saving Contract Payment Plan” – If you’re seeing this error message, it’s likely due to the fact that the school admin selected a payment plan on the student’s contract before the parent viewed the contract.



“Generate cannot be done at this time as tuition and deposits cannot be calculated for all students listed” – While a mouthful, this error often appears due to the Tuition not being sent up. Tuition amounts must be present for the student’s grade level.



“No students have been assigned to this contract” – There are a couple reasons a message like this could be appearing. This tends to happen most frequently with Candidates and the years mismatching. For example, the school issues a 2021-2022 contract for a candidate with a 2022-2023 Entering year. Alternatively, this can also happen when a student assigned to the contract doesn’t meet the criteria set up for Tuition. This could mean things like a different grade level, school program, or the International selection not matching.



“Smart Family ID already exists” – As the error states, this family is already in Tuition management. This could be the result of an integrated contract being deleted in Enrollment Management after the family completed enrollment. A family may have also manually enrolled a sibling into BBTM and are trying to use the same account inside EMS.



“School is unable to record Financial Aid for Student” – If a student has a BBTM contract assigned, they can only be assigned Financial Aid items that are mapped and included on the Contract Form.



Things to Know Before Calling Support



Naturally, our support team is standing by to assist. To better help them in the troubleshooting process, it would be ideal to have answers to the following questions:

• Who is it impacting? - This could mean things like multiple users, a specific role, one user in particular, or everyone at the school.
• When did the issue start? – Knowing when something started helps correlate similar issues that may have been submitted or perhaps another activity that occurred at that time inside of the database.
• Has this happened before? – If something happened last year, the solution could be as easy as looking up the ticket from the previous year.
• Contract details – Things like what kind of contract is experiencing the issue, due dates, publish date, name of the contract form, etc.
• Finally, it’s also worth mentioning if your school has any deadlines approaching to help set expectations for the agent. Include as many specifics as possible, leave no stone unturned!

That’s going to do it for this week’s blog as well as our Contract Season series. We hope you found it informative and helpful. However, should things get a bit out of hand, our Blackbaud support team is standing by to help if needed. In addition, please visit our online help center, blog post showing off recent additions to Contracts, or check out our Enrollment Contract Overview Webinar for even more contract information.