The Month In Review: May 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Even though June is here and summer vacation draws ever near, there’s one last thing we need to do. Let’s review everything that arrived and changed for the Education management products during May 2021.The May flowers have turned into June heat and no doubt schools everywhere have begun the summer vacation countdown.

With the Blackbaud Education Management products, we’ve continued to add functionality while making quality of life changes across the board. So before you take off for the summer fun, let’s take one last look back at May to highlight everything that we released. Enjoy!

Core
We continued the trend we started in April by continuing to make improvements to the Inbox, notifications, and the View Communications area. When deleting an inbox message from View Communications, any related response to that message is now deleted as well. A confirmation box appears to let the person know what is about to happen before the message is deleted. In addition, when a user is removed from a particular role, they'll no longer continue to receive notifications related to that role.

Administrators can now see the notification subject from the Item column under View Communications. Better yet, we’ve also added the ability to not only increase the modal window size when typing a new Message, but also the text box size as well.

Also released this month:

• When you view student data, the Withdraw date is now labeled Depart date. This this field along with the Has graduated field when you create and view reports for graduated students.
• When an import manager runs a job, the information is validated by the import service. Now, the job status indicates when the job is in the validation process. Additionally, the start and end times for the job process appear to inform the user when the job is completed.
• When you create an insight for student grades and names, you can now show each student’s User ID. Additionally, we’ve added a new attribute for Candidate status and renamed the old attribute to Candidate status description.

Enrollment management
This month, the EMS team tackled forms by making some improvements to the system in general. First, form recipients no longer see a banner for forms that have been declined instead of completed. Instead, declined forms will now appear as completed forms. In addition, when an enrollment manager views form submissions, they’ll now see recipients who have declined the form with an option to allow them to resubmit.

When adding or editing a School form, enrollment managers can also enable an Allow for Decline? setting, which allows the recipient to decline the form. By default, this setting is set to No. When copying a form, that Allow for Decline? setting will now be copied over as well.
Also this month:

• Admissions managers now have a Recommender name column on the Process Recommendations list.
• We've added a warning message to the username generator that informs the user of upcoming changes happening in July. Specifically, on July 6, the only available username formula will be email address.

Billing management
For the month of May, Billing management tackled a number of topics. Comments received a bunch of updates this month including making International and Comments are now available as optional columns on the Transactions list. However, the team also made Comments available on two additional lists as well: Recent payments and Work with transactions.

Everything else this month:

• Statement recipient summary is now available as a column on the Students list. Billing clerks can use this new column to identify students with divided parental responsibility.
• Billing clerks can now export the Aged Accounts receivables list to a PDF to help streamline and standardize data for auditors to review.
• Under Tasks, Billing clerks now have access to a new option: Add enrollment deposit to group. Billing clerks can use this task to streamline adding enrollment deposits to multiple students at once, significantly mitigating the workload for schools who implement Billing management after their enrollment window.
• Billing clerks can add enrollment deposits to a group of students rather than one by one. This feature can be useful in cases where a school has collected deposits before implementing Billing management and needs the credits to appear on student accounts.
• Selecting Mark transactions as posted now results in a confirmation prompt appearing with the following dialogue, "Do you want to mark # transactions as Posted?". Billing clerks must approve this prompt before transactions are marked as posted and thus become unmodifiable.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in May, make sure to visit our What’s New letter. Use the Recent option at the top of the page to view past and archived releases. Want to stay updated whenever we have a new release? Get notified via email by signing up for our mailing list here.

That’s all for this review. Make sure to come back next week as I detail our plans over the next few months. There may be a programming change, so don’t miss it. See you then!