As families and staff transition to new rooms and programs at the start of the year, Administrators or Managers will want to take a few actions in brightwheel to keep information up-to-date and to prevent any errors in messaging or tuition billing.
Student and contact management
🎓 When a child graduates or leaves your program
Change their enrollment status. Update the child's enrollment status to ensure they are hidden from default views of your student and room lists. You will continue to have access to all student information, regardless of enrollment status.
Remove their room assignments. Remove Rooms assigned to the child's profile so your room lists are always accurate. This will also prevent any accidental check-ins.
End bill plans. Make sure billing plans are scheduled to end when a child leaves. You can also temporarily pause billing plans.
Issue a credit or refund for their deposit. If the family paid a deposit, you can issue a credit or refund in brightwheel.
👋 When new families join your program
Add student profiles individually or in bulk. Start tracking student records for families and communicate with them in brightwheel as early as the first time you get in touch with them. Enrollment statuses such as Prospect, Waitlist, Toured and Applied will enable you to send prospective families messages and forms without having their children in default views of your roster.
If the family member already has a brightwheel account from a different program, follow these steps to connect their existing account to your program.
Create new bill plans with a template. Save time and create templates with the same charges and payment schedule.
Additional Resources:
🔀 When children transition to new Rooms
Bulk update Homeroom assignments if multiple children in a Room will be transitioning to the same new Room.
Staff management
The beginning of a new school year or seasonal program is an excellent opportunity for administrators to review staff records. This may include:
Creating staff profiles to invite new staff members to brightwheel
Adjust staff access by managing roles and updating staff room assignments
Removing staff profiles for staff members who are not expected to return for the following season or school year
Additional Resources:
End-of-year cleanup
🚪 Clean up Rooms
Some programs choose to keep the same or similar rooms from year-to-year, while some programs opt to create new rooms or rename rooms for each seasonal or school year transition.
Administrators and managers have full control over room management, including creating rooms, editing or renaming rooms, and deleting rooms.
📝 Clean up Forms
Close or delete any forms you don’t want parents accessing anymore. If you close the form, you can re-open these forms at any time if you need to access the information. Delete forms you don't plan to use again.
💲 Clean up Charges in billing
The end of the year is a great time to review your Charge Library. If rates have changed or if your program will be offering different services, it is recommended to make sure those adjustments are reflected in the Charge Library before new billing plans are created.
Additional Resources
🌴 Summer programs or closures
Billing
Create one-time charges for any summer camp registrations, field trips and supply fees
Pause billing plans for any students who will not be billed during the summer months