Processing contracts with one signature when two are required

Helen Snyder

Our school is switching to having two signatures required to consider a contract complete. However, in the case of 1 signature and the deposit has been submitted we want to go ahead and process that contract and consider the student enrolled. Is there a way to do this??

Shannon Krise

@Helen Snyder You can accept the contract manually. We do this if needed in the same situation. If you edit the contract on the “Contracts” tab in Enrollment Management, you can enter a “Date Returned.” I haven't done this in a while, but I'm pretty sure that's all I needed to do. From then on, the contract functions the same way as a returned contract, except that it will include a line at the top of the contract indicating that the contract was manually accepted by an administrator. The signature you did receive remains on the contract as usual.

Rick Geyer

@Helen Snyder I understand wanting to count them as enrolled, but will you still be following up with the family to collect the additional signature? If not, then why require two signatures? And if you are going to follow-up for the signature, how are you going to motivate them to submit the signature when their child is already counted as enrolled?

Requiring two signatures is what I would recommend to any school that asked me, but I also would recommend not making any exceptions. Otherwise, your families will start to catch on that both parents don't really have to sign, and you will end up having to do more work to manually process a growing number of one-signature contracts.

For our internal purposes, we count one signature contracts with a paid deposit as enrolled, but externally we are still communicating to the families that we need both signatures if they want to save their child's seat. When you are filtering a contract list, there are options on the contracts tab of Pending Additional Signatures (Yes/No) and Deposit paid (Yes/No) that you can use to easily identify all the contracts that are in this state. We count those contracts in our re-enrollment numbers when reporting internally, but we do still require them to submit the other signature before they are fully enrolled. Just my two cents. :-)

Troy Burki

@Helen Snyder Similar to what Rick just mentioned - the main question is whether you plan on ultimately collecting the missing signature or not. This also ties in to legal questions that you would want to have reviewed based on what is stated in the contract. If you're just interested in moving the candidates into enrolled/incoming student status in the system once you have a signature and the deposit, that isn't necessarily tied to the contract status and is just based on the school and candidate decisions using the enroll or inactivate candidate section of EMS.

Barbara V Glass

@Helen Snyder
You also want to ensure all parents can log into their profiles to sign the contract. We email all parents before making the contracts available and encourage them to check their log-in so that each parent can access the contract and sign it. If not you will spend time responding to log-in access emails.

Helen Snyder

@Barbara Glass Thanks that is a helpful tip

Helen Snyder

@Rick Geyer Thank you for your insights - very helpful

Helen Snyder

@Shannon Krise Thank you Shannon - good to know how to return the contract manually.