With the school year wrapping up, we've been busy, just like you! This month's update brings a fresh new payment flow, Automated Communication Plans for your newest leads, and address autofill in the Parent Portal — plus extended reach for our External API and a more complete view of school emails in Recent Activity. And as always, we've been quietly squashing bugs in the background to keep things running smoothly across billing, lottery, calendars, and forms.

What's New

• Payment Flow - Redesigned Parent Experience: The Billing tab and Form Payments now share a refreshed, multi-step payment experience. Parents can add or change their payment method through a dedicated modal, see their total balance directly on the payments page, and move through checkout in clearer steps. 
• Leads - Automated Communication Plans (ACPs): ACPs can now be configured to trigger automatically when a new lead is added — whether from CMS, Niche, or a manual admin entry. Each ACP fires based on the lead's state at the moment it arrives: Active (parent info only) or Progressed (parent plus child/prospect info), letting schools tailor early outreach to each lead type. 
• Parent Portal - Address Autofill: As parents begin typing in Address Line 1 on Parent Portal forms, a Google-powered drop-down suggests real addresses. Selecting one fills in city, state, ZIP, and country automatically, while Address Line 2 stays available for apartment or suite details. 
• External API - Uploaded Files: Uploaded files are now accessible through the External API, making it easier to retrieve documents associated with student records programmatically. 
• Automatically Rename Uploaded Files: You can now turn on an option to auto rename parent-uploaded files at the time of upload. The name will include the student name, checklist item name, and term. Once this is on, you'll see an additional option to rename existing files in the system. Find these configurations under Settings > General > Basic Setup, in the File Upload secton.

Improvements 

• Recent Activity - Billing and Calendar Emails Included: Emails generated by billing reminders and calendar events now appear in a contact's Recent Activity alongside manually sent and ACP-driven messages, giving admins a more complete view of school communications in one place. 
• Billing - Expanded Payout Reports: Individual payout reports now include student and payer IDs, and per-line-item Transaction IDs in both the UI and exports, supporting accurate reconciliation for individuals with similar names. Student IDs appear when a line item is expanded, since some transactions span multiple students.
• ACPs - Names Now Required for New Plans: Every newly created ACP must now have a name. Existing unnamed ACPs continue to work — this rule only applies going forward. The change is intended to make ACPs easier to recognize and manage as your library grows; a search bar will follow.
• Notifications - Lead Received from Parent (Immediate): Admins notified whenever a lead is added, whether by a parent submitting a form or an admin entering one manually.

Bug Fixes

• Lottery - Siblings incorrectly included: Fixed an issue where the "automatically accept siblings" and "automatically waitlist same-grade siblings" lottery options included students whose status was not active. 
• Lottery - Students incorrectly excluded: Resolved an issue where Lottery Option 1 was being applied to lottery results even when the option was turned off, which could incorrectly exclude certain students from selection.
• Payments - Line Items Display: Fixed an issue where multi-item form payments were only showing a combined total; each line item now displays separately, with a clear base amount, convenience fee, and final total.
• Payments - Convenience Fee descriptions: Resolved a display issue where parents were seeing convenience-fee text for payment types that had been turned off.
• Quickbooks Integration: The Quickbooks API can now link payments to journal entries through a new journalentrywithpayment row, and transaction dates are now included.
• Recent Activity Notes & Emojis: Pasting text containing unsupported emojis into a contact's Recent Activity now strips the emojis and preserves the surrounding text, with a small notice indicating the change. Previously, all text following an unsupported emoji was being dropped.
• Lead Security: Implemented new validation to block fake leads. The name field now blocks special characters and submissions are limited to 25 per day from a single email address.