Release Notes 2021-03-29

BigSIS SPRING 2021 UPDATES/NEW FEATURES

1. Introducing the new Academic Year Wizard 🧙
   • This wizard is designed to be a one-stop shop for all your Academic Year setup needs for the current year and the upcoming year
   • All steps and tools needed to create, edit, and keep track of your academic year configuration in one location
   • Eliminates the need to keep track of what's left to do when setting up an academic year, the wizard will help guide you at all times
   • Examples of items that the wizard will help you take care of
     • Set up academic years
       • Automatically create school days and holidays during the academic year setup with no additional work
       • Predict new terms with correct titles and dates
       • A few button clicks and you're done setting up the new academic year!
     • Set up schedule options for programs
       • Add schedules like half-day, full day, 2-day, 5-day, etc. for your programs and students with easy to follow steps
     • Process re-enrollments
       • Now with the ability to put students into cohorts/classrooms (more on this below) and keep them together when enrolling them into new academic years
       • Now with the ability to automatically open attendance records during re-enrollment so you never have to take care of this step later on (and possibly forget)
     • Create courses
     • Add students to courses
     • Easier and quicker ability to add advisors & associates
     • Easily enable daily attendance taking in the portal for teachers
       • Now with the ability to take attendance either by program or by cohort/classroom
       • Setting up teachers with the ability to take daily attendance from the portal has never been easier, just select the teachers that should have this ability, select the program or cohort, and voila you're done
     • Set up the academic year and admission process for next year
       • Now, setting up your next year is easier than ever. The new wizard takes care of everything for you including copying over the data from the previous year and predicting new dates and titles (even for tuition contracts)
     • All of these items are now housed under one location!
   • In addition to the new amazing features listed above, the wizard will now be able to track your progress for each step (quickly listing relevant data that you have completed for each step) and will alert you if one of the steps is incomplete
   • You can also use the wizard to make adjustments during the academic year such as changing the program, cohort/classroom, or schedule of a student
     
     
2. Introducing Cohorts (aka Classrooms)
   • Students may now be placed into distinct cohorts, this offers schools a new way to group students
   • Available for daily attendance, reports*, directories*, family participation and more
   • The people, leads, enrollment, student and other tables may now be grouped and filtered by cohort
   • Exports from these tables can now include the students' cohorts
   • Teachers and Associates/Advisors can now take attendance by cohort in the portal
   • Daily attendance can also be taken by cohort from the BigSIS admin
   • Family participation can now be tracked by cohort in our newly improved family participation tool (more below)
   • Cohorts are also now listed on all Quickviews
     
     
3. Introducing Schedule Types
   • The schedule type of a student (e.g., half-day, full-day) may now be added to a student's enrollment
   • You can filter by schedule type in many tables in BigSIS
   • The schedule type can also appear on all Quickviews
     
     
4. Greatly Improved Family Participation Widget
   • The family participation widget has lots of new and exciting features
   • In addition to the family participation by program, we've added a second widget that tracks family participation by cohort
   • Both widgets now feature specific student counts as well as all programs and all cohorts counts
   • Both widgets are now interactive
     • Click on any of the bars to access a wealth of data for the selected program or cohort
   • Access reports to see if a specific student's family has participated or not, how much they have donated, a listing of each donation they have made, which family members have participated, what solicitors are assigned to the family, who the siblings of the student are and much more
   • Email families that have not participated
     
     
5. New "Advanced Enrollment Query"
   • The new 'Advanced Enrollment Query' can filter by any combination of program (e.g., 1,st grade, 2nd grade), cohort (e.g., classroom), or schedule type (e.g., half-day, full-day)
   • Don't worry, if you prefer the old Enrollment Query, you can set it back from the Client Settings
     
     
6. Donations & Donor Profiles
   • The roles of the donors who made the donation are now listed on each donation
   • You may now select the specific columns you want displayed on the list of donations from within a donor profile.
     
     
7. Minor UI Improvements
   • In some places, we've added new progress bars to tools that take a long time so instead of simply seeing a "loading..." screen, you may now sometimes see a bar that slowly grows from 0% to 100% so you can estimate how much time is left for the tool to complete
     
     
8. Minor Bug Fixes
   • In some cases, if a sibling of a student made a donation, the participation widget was not counting the family as participating, this has been fixed
   • In some cases, if a parent made a donation through a Donor-Advised Fund, the donation was not getting counted in the family participation, this has been fixed

*The new cohort grouping is currently available on a limited set of reports and directories (in the portal) with more options coming soon.