Brightwheel’s Admissions Process & Tracker functionality helps administrators to easily organize enrollment steps and manage relationships with prospective families. An Admission Process is a collection of forms, contracts, or document requests that can be bundled together in trackable steps. These process steps can be shared directly to parent-level contacts in brightwheel, automatically opening up access to all the included forms. Once shared, the students will appear on the process tracker so administrators can easily track families' progress on submitting required paperwork.

Create a Process

Adding a new process requires that administrators have admissions forms, fillable forms, contracts, or document requests already created on the Forms & Requests tab. When there is a library of admissions forms ready, administrators can follow these steps to create the first process:

Navigate to the Process tab in the Admissions section of brightwheel
Choose Create New Process to get started
Fill in the required fields and choose Save & Complete to open the step builder

Here is an overview of the field options when creating a new process:

Name - The name of the process which will be included in the email when it is shared with families.
Due Date - An optional date to help administrators stay aligned on parent progress. Parents will not see this due date and they will still be able to submit applications past that date.
Welcome Message - An optional text that will be sent to families once the process is shared. This is a great place to share any instructions that would be helpful for parents to know when completing the process.

Adding Steps and Tasks

Once a process has been created, administrators will be prompted to add the first step in the process. Administrators can use the steps to organize forms, contracts, and document requests into logical groups of tasks to help when tracking family progress on the process. The step names are to assist administrators with internal progress tracking and will not be visible to parents. Here is how to add a step from the popup page:

Enter Step Name
Select tasks from the list of forms, contracts, and document requests that should be completed in this step
Press Save & Complete
To add any additional steps to the process click the +Create New Step on the bottom of the page
Click the grid to the left of the step number to drag and drop to rearrange the order of steps in the process

Changing Process Status

When a process is ready to be shared with families, administrators can change the status to Live. Here’s how:

Navigate to the Settings tab on the process detail page
Under Status use the dropdown to change from Draft to Live

A process must be marked as live to share with families. Administrators can also set the status to Archived. The archived process will remain on the account but is not shareable with new families.

Processes in the Draft status can be changed to Live or Archived, but once moved out of the draft status they cannot be changed back. However, administrators can change from Live to Archived and back again all from the Settings page. Processes with a live status are able to be edited.

ℹ️ Archiving a process will not revoke access to any forms previously shared with families.

Sharing a Process with Parents

Once a process has a live status, it can be shared directly with parent-level contacts within brightwheel. Here’s how:

Navigate to the Process tab in the Admissions section of brightwheel
Click on the name of the process that needs to be shared
From the Actions drop-down menu select Send to Parents
Select one or more students to share the process with
Choose the Share button

The student list will default to show students with active, prospect, toured, applied, waitlist, or enrolled status. To choose students with a status other than those listed, remove the student status filters.

Once a process has been shared, those parent-level contacts will receive an email letting them know that they have new process documents available in their brightwheel accounts. Parents will need to log into their brightwheel accounts on the web or in the app in order to access all the process forms.

All the forms, document requests, and contracts associated with the shared process will be made available to parents and will appear on their student’s Forms & Documents page.

🚩 If a form in a process has already been shared or completed by a parent, sending the process will share a new form with the parent and the completed form will not shown as complete under the process status.

Tracking Process Completion

Once a process has been shared with families the Student Progress tab within the Process will be populated with all the students included in that process. From this page, administrators will be able to see which families have started filling out their forms and be able to track progress through each process step. A green check mark under the process step indicates that the family has submitted all required tasks to complete this step and they have all been approved by an administrator.

Administrators can use the filters to quickly search by individual students, rooms, or programs. Using the Process Status filter allows administrators to quickly sort the table to only show families who have completed, are in progress, or have not started the process. The Actions dropdown next to each student can be used to quickly send messages to families or remove students from the process.

ℹ️ If a student is removed from the process, it will not revoke access to the shared forms. If a student is removed from a process we recommend going to the student's Forms & Requests tab to delete the forms shared in the process. If needed, these removed students can be easily added back through the shared workflow and any previously completed steps will be represented on the table.

Remove Form from a Process

If you need to remove a specific form from a process (like if the form is now outdated and there's a new version), this is easily done.

Log into your account on the web
Click on Admissions on the left sidebar
Select Process from the top
Click on the desired process name
Select Process Steps (located directly under the process name)
Click on the trash can next to the form you want to remove

Once this is complete, you can archive the removed form by marking it as closed.

Please keep in mind that once a process has had one form added to it, one form must always be added to it. If the only form linked to it is the one that you want to remove, you’ll need to add a new form to the process before you can delete the wanted one. We recommend creating a form specifically for this purpose. That way you can use it if ever needed.

FAQs

Can parents view the steps including what has been completed?

No this is only visible to Admins and Managers.

Are forms shared in the order of the process steps?

The forms in a process are all shared at the same time so Parents will view the forms in either Recent Activity or Name order depending on what they have filtered. This does mean that forms might be completed out of order.

Can a process be shared with a link?

At this time, there is no way to share a link to a Process. It must be sent to the families directly so there will need to already be a student profile created with at least one parent added to the contacts.