Extended Care Module
Overview of Features & Setup
Our Extended Care Module is designed to handle the setup and management of your extended care programs (also known as Aftercare, Kindercare, etc.). With the Extended Care Module, you can:
- Setup your extended care sessions and rooms (session groups)
- Setup your billing options
- Generate invoices for parents and billing reports for accounting
- Setup which days the sessions are offered
- Allow parents to manage signups online via the portal
- See who is signed up for which days
- Print daily rosters and daily sign in/out sheets
CONCEPTS:
- SESSION: A session refers to the extended care program offered by your school such as “Kindercare” or “Aftercare.” Sessions can then have groups underneath them (see below). All occurrences and signups are tied to the Session and then the children are moved into the Session Groups on a daily basis based on parent preferences, availability and your internal rules.
- SESSION GROUP: A Session Group would most often be an individual room, such as “Kindercare with Ms. Sara” or “Aftercare with Mr. Peter.”
- SIGNUP CONFIGURATIONS: Each Session can be set up with different signup & pricing rules. For example, you can setup your sessions to charge extra for last minute signups. Other examples include:
- All Available Sessions: Similar to “Every Monday” (below), but not restricted by day of week.
- Drop-In: Sign up for a single Occurrence. Pricing could reflect the fact that you are only signing up for one day and all or some of the fees could be different.
- Last Minute Sign-up: Like drop-in, but when it is within a certain time (such as 60 minutes). This could be the same rate as Drop-In, but could also be set up to be even more expensive.
- Every Monday: This configuration would sign up the child for every future Monday that the Session is offered and could have a certain rate, such as:
- Meaning you pay in blocks of 15 minutes
- Alternatively, this could be set to end at the session end time, even if they are picked up early
- $5 per hour that the child is there
- Checkout rounding set to 15 minutes
- Billing starts at occurrence start time, regardless of when the child arrives
- Billing ends when the child is picked up
- Last minute cancellation fee of $10, up till 1 hour before, then no-show fee applies
- No-Show fee of $20
- Etc.
- See image below to see examples of some of the fields
- CAPACITY: For each Session Group you can set up a default capacity, such as 12. This will be used when creating your occurrences/instances as a default but will be editable per day.
- OCCURRENCES: For each session you can set up as many occurrences as you like and each one can have a capacity. This will be suggested to you based on the default capacity of your Session Groups that are under that Session. So, for example, you may offer Kindercare every day in two rooms, but on Fridays you only offer one room and maybe even at different times. Therefore the default for each room could be 12 and the capacity for each Occurrence would be 24, except for Friday when it’s 12.
- RECURRENCE RULE: Recurrence Rules help you create all of your occurrences more quickly. If you use the example above, you would create 2 rules. One for Monday-Thursday and another for Friday. Below is an example of your Monday-Thursday Occurrence Rule.
- SESSION DEEP COPY: Once you have set up one Session with all your pricing and other configuration, you can select it from the list of Sessions and make a Deep Copy. All the information that makes sense to copy will get copied to a new Session which you can then edit and configure for your other Session (e.g. copy Kindercare and then set up as Aftercare).
- PARTICIPANT: A Participant is like a Student record in BigSIS. A Student record doesn’t give you much, except for a shell under which to store your Admissions and Enrollments as well as various other things related to your time as a student. Similarly a Participant record just gives you a place to store your Session Registrations and Signups.
- SESSION REGISTRATION: The Session Registration is the link between a Participant and a Session, such as Kindercare. This does not actually sign them up for any occurrences, but it means they are tied to the Session and are able to sign up for Occurrences. This can be done by the parent in the portal or by an admin user in the back end of BigSIS. These can be approved by default or they can “requested” in the portal and then need to be approved by an admin before the user can sign up for Occurrences. We have a tool to help create these Registrations (see below).
- BULK SIGNUP TOOL: We have a great tool to help create Participants and Registrations. It is our “Extended Care Bulk Signup” tool that you can find in the menu. It allows you to select a few parameters, such as:
- Academic School Year
- Program
- Session
Once you do this, it finds all the students who are enrolled in that program during the selected academic year. You can select them all or hand-select the ones you want. You can then select a Preferred Session Group for that Registration, decide if they should be Approved and add bulk notes. When you click “Signup Students” it will create any necessary Participant records and add Session Registrations for the students you chose. Each Registration will remember which is the Preferred Session Group for that Participant, so it can ease the daily assignments.
- SIGN UPS: Parents or admin users can Sign Up a Participant (child) for one of the Session Occurrences, or do it in bulk (e.g. “All Mondays”). Once a child is signed up, that record will remain in the system and will be used to track the billing model as well as their status and checkin/checkout details.
- OPT OUT: Allows parents to Opt Out of a certain day if their child is pre-registered for multiple sessions. This will keep your student capacity accurate so you can register new participants if needed!
- EXTENDED CARE PORTAL: We have a new tab for parents in their portal called “Extended Care” (or whatever you decide to name it under Portal Setup). This new area will give parents the ability to manage their signups, including:
- Sign Up for any available Signup Configuration you have made public
- Opt Out from any Occurrences they have signed up for
- See calendars of their children with their signups
- CHECK IN / CHECK OUT: We will have the ability to mark children as signed in via a bulk tool. Then you can sign them out one by one as they are picked up. A portal (tablet-friendly) version of this feature will hopefully be available in the next couple of weeks.
- REPORTS: Initial Reports will concentrate on rosters and availability for sessions. We will be adding more reports over the coming weeks and months as we have more time and receive more feedback from users.
- BILLING: Billing will be done via your existing external systems, at least for the foreseeable future. We plan to have PDF and Excel exports from BigSIS with summaries of attendance and calculated billing for each participant for a given time period. So, for example, you could pull a report from October 1st to October 31st for Kindercare and get a page for each Participant with a line for each day they attended and details on the billing model and checkin/checkout time as well as the charge for that day. Then at the bottom would be a summary of the total number of Occurrences attended in the selected timeframe as well as the total charge for that period. We hope to have this report available in the next few weeks.
- START USING EXTENDED CARE: If you would like to try out this module, please contact us for more information and to set up a demo. Email support@bigsis.com or call 844-424-4747 x12.
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