Lessons learned from adding contracts after several years of Tuition Management use

We have been using BBTM for about 3 years and decided to add contracts through Enrollment Management this year. After working on this for about 3 months, we encountered several errors during the setup phase that we were not made aware of. If you are considering adding contracts after using BBTM, please learn from our experience.

1. While testing on staff-parents before sending it to all parents, everything went smoothly with a staff member who only has one student. However, when there are siblings, an error can occur with linking the BBTM account.
2. BBTM has a “main/primary” account holder. If the other parent logs in first, it appears as if they don't have a BBTM account, which prompts them to set up another one. We tried to avoid this by sending a mail merge to parents ahead of time with their BBTM login username, but it was not seamless.
3. During our testing process, a test student was added to an administrator's account to capture screen examples for parents and test the connection. This created an account in BBTM for the staff member, and the contract could not be edited until the pending BBTM account was purged. On the day contracts needed to be sent, we couldn’t reach our Blackbaud representative at the end of the day due to different time zones. I called Blackbaud at 4 PM (Pacific Time) and found that they were closed. I left a voicemail following the prompts to notify that our system was down. Technically, it was, because the contract was locked and we couldn’t make adjustments until the BBTM account was purged, which can only be done by Blackbaud. I received an auto-reply stating that support had closed for the day and would reopen the next morning. As a result, we couldn’t send the contracts on the expected day and had to inform parents of the delay.
4. There is an issue with adding images to the contract. We tried adding a table as an image and with HTML, as well as the Head of Schools’ signature as an image. The online version looks fine in preview and during the signing process, but disappears when you try to print the contract. This seems to be a known “limitation with the vendor BB uses to generate the reports themselves.” None of the BB implementation staff we worked with were aware of this issue. There is no current resolution other than voting for the fix in the idea bank.
5. Set the notifications area to inactive until after generating contracts, then make it active. Otherwise, notifications set for when the contract is activated won't go out.
6. If you have parents with separate BBTM accounts, turn on Split Billing Option in Core... Core > Settings > Blackbaud Connections > Tuition Management Settings.