The Month In Review: August 2023 Feature Releases

By now, most of you probably have kids roaming the halls, homework ready to be handed out, and classrooms full of people ready to be taught. Yup, it’s a new School Year

As September kicks off, we’re taking one last look back at August and all of the new content and updates that were delivered for Blackbaud’s education management products. Let’s jump in and take a look!

Academics
For August, the Academics teams redesigned the Course Requests entry page from My Day for Students and Parents. Users now have more control over the details that appear under the Available courses section as there is a filter that can be applied, a search bar for locating something specific, and a new drop-down field that lists specific courses.

Selected request is now known as My requests and the total values have moved to the top Course Requests area. Select a course from My requests to open a flyout with additional details including course descriptions, how many credits it's worth, who recommended it, which semesters have been requested, and more.

Also in August:

• In the gradebook, faculty can now use their keyboards to enter letter grades and skills.
• The Nickname column name field has been updated to Preferred Name. To help situations where a student does not have a Preferred name listed, we've added a new column called Preferred|First.
• On group pages, the Roster tab now displays constituent Pronouns. Previously, users had to open a constituent’s profile from the roster to view their pronouns.
• For schools using Competency Based Education (CBE), the Computation Method settings are no longer locked down once skill evaluations have been entered. Previously, a data fix was required to modify these settings if skill evaluations were present.

Blackbaud Billing Management™
For the month of August, the Blackbaud Billing Management team had a number of additions for their users. Advance payments enable the recording of payments made before a defined date (e.g., July 1, 202X) into a deferred liability account. These advance payments credit a liability account (e.g., Prepaid Revenue) when applied to charges within the billing year until the defined date passes. On this date, a reversal occurs, and the money is debited from the Prepaid Revenue account, and Accounts Receivable is credited.

Billing clerks enable Advance payments by navigating to Billing years and selecting Advance payments in the navigation.

More updates in August:

• Payers using the “Other amount” option to make a custom payment toward their Auto-Pay installments will now find that part of the installment is applied to due or past-due charges outside of payment plans.
• Student name is now a selectable merge field for billing notifications, enabling Billing clerks to further personalize notices with the Preferred name (if available), or otherwise First name, and Last name of the student receiving the notification.
• Payers can now sign up for and manage Auto-Pay from the Payment plans page in the Payer Portal, providing payers convenient access to the existing functionality found through the Current bill.
• Miscellaneous fees now possess additional dimensions to help determine to which account distributions are posted. Under GL distributions, Billing clerks first select a different set of GL accounts based on each student and then choose from the available dimensions.

Core
Users with rights to view and manage a user’s affinity categories will notice a new Affinity tile now appears on the user’s Core profile, on the Access tab. This will eventually replace the Affinity Categories button which currently appears on the same tab. In a future release, users will be able to edit affinities from this new tile via an updated user interface.

As part of this update, we disabled the security task for User affinity categories (ID 529, People domain, under My profile) for the All-school role. We also enabled this task for Platform manager and Billing clerk roles (including clones), because they already have access to parts of the Core user profile that aren’t Contact card data.

Also this month:

• Files for the Audio content type are no longer converted. Users can only upload MP3 files for this content type.
• The character limit for a profile notice is 500 characters, even when editing. Additionally, when you create or edit a profile notice a counter now indicates the number of characters remaining to reach the limit.
• Platform managers who have the User profile (53405) or Manage login (53788) task enabled can now view which roles are enabled for each user. From a user’s profile in Core, select Tasks. A list of tasks which are enabled for at least one of the user’s roles appears. To view all tasks which could be enabled for their roles, clear the filter called Hide disabled.
• When a data import manager runs the BBID Username Import, it now places the BBID into both the Blackbaud ID username field and the Username field.
• Previously, when users accessed a school directory, results for view, search, and printing were limited to 200 entries. With this release, we’ve increased the number of results to a maximum of 2,000.
• When a platform manager views the list of security roles (Core, Security, Roles), the grid now includes options to See more when a cell contains a large amount of information.
• Platform managers configure table values for pronouns, which are no longer dependent on gender values.

Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™
For August, Events were a big focus of the Blackbaud Enrollment Management System team. We've added new delete options for admissions managers when working with events. When viewing an Event Attendee list, admissions managers can now select Deleted Attendees to see a list of everyone who registered but was deleted. This displays the Attendee name, Date registered, Date deleted, and who deleted the registration.

On the Form Submissions list, admissions managers can now delete registration forms in bulk. Select the form submissions and then Delete to remove the records. A confirmation modal appears to confirm the deletion and to help prevent accidental clicks. The details are then logged for auditing as needed.

Finally, admissions managers can also delete an event registration from the Process event registration page. A delete button appears at the bottom after a registration is selected, which then causes a confirmation window to appear.

Other updates this month:

• We've updated the Candidate Checklist so that parents now see any checklist step that has been waived by the school as Waived instead of Completed.
• For users with access to the Dashboard builder, we've added a resources tile to the Enrollment management homepage with quick access to dashboards and links to timely resources, like annual procedures.
• Admissions managers can now view any forms that have been fully declined by a recipient in a separate grouping within the submissions modal.
• When working with Official Notes, we've updated the formatting for the Candidate Outstanding Items to display as a bulleted list rather than a paragraph.
• When viewing Contracts from a Candidate or Student Profile, we've added a View deleted contracts button which displays an audit log containing information of when the contract was deleted, who deleted it, and if any reason was added for why it was deleted.
• Admissions managers can now view forms that have been started but not submitted inside of the Forms Submissions list using the Date Started and Form Status columns.
• The Pronouns field has been added to a number of locations within Enrollment Management. Admissions managers can find it within the Applicant and Household blocks on Inquiry Forms. It can also be used on User Profile, User Children, User Sibling, and User Grandparent blocks with School Forms and Profile Update forms. In addition, the Sample Inquiry form and Sample Application form has the pronoun field on the Applicant, Household, and Siblings blocks.
• Thanks to the Ideas Bank in the community, we've made a couple of quality-of-life changes to School Forms. For example, admissions managers can now choose the sort order when creating options for a form field rather than it set to alphabetical by default. In addition, the parent, candidate, student, or recommender filling out a form will now see in the specific order that the admissions manager selected in the editor.

Extracurricular
This month, we added the ability for Athletic Group Managers to publish a team’s game and practice schedules from Manage teams in Extracurricular.

Financial Aid Management
A big update in August! To assist schools in complying with US privacy laws, schools can now choose to include statements in the Special Circumstances section of the financial aid application for families to indicate that they want to opt out of the sale of their personal information or opt out of targeted ads. If these statements are included in the application, school users can view a family’s opt-out preferences in their Application Details.

Other additions in August:

• The Financial Aid application now accepts HEIC and HEIF file types for document uploads.
• When searching for a school in the Financial Aid application, applicants must now enter at least three characters in the School Code field or School Name field.

Blackbaud Tuition Management™
In August, the Blackbaud Tuition Management™ team enabled it so that administrators and finance users can now impersonate payers to view Tuition Management from their perspective. Through impersonation, you can navigate as a payer to view account information and billing details. However, you cannot make any changes on behalf of the payer, such as processing payments, stopping or resuming auto debits, and modifying billing or account information.

Additionally, when impersonating a payer with accounts at multiple schools, you cannot select Switch school account to access the payer’s account at another school.

Also in August:

• When defining criteria for rate cards, a new Select All option is available when choosing type codes, payment plans, student codes, and grades.

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That's going to put the wraps on August 2023. There's plenty more on the way, so make sure to stay up to date by subscribing to the Community so you don’t miss a thing. See you right back here next week for more Blackbaud education management content!