Our focus this month was data privacy! We’ve added a new user role - “Counselor” - which gives access to a specific set of assigned students. Also, we’ve added SMS/text messages to the Recent Activity section of all student contact records for full transparency. Continuing our analytics work, we’ve added a field for your Google Tag Manager ID. Finally, we fixed an important billing issue related to a new practice by banks that now expire autopay mandates and require parents to re-enter their information periodically.

What's New

• Counselor Role: This feature is for schools that have counselors who should only have access to certain students, such as those affected by FERPA. Counselors will have a new type of limited user permissions, allowing them to view student contact records only when assigned to them by an administrator. They will be able to view and complete checklist items to help students with their application, including internal checklist items that may require uploading documents not visible to students and parents.
• SMS/Texts now part of the Recent Activity Log: Text message history is now included in each student contact record’s Recent Activity log! Just as all other activity types, the activity list can be filtered to show only text messages for a quick overview of all texting history, and permission-based visibility can be assigned to each text message.
• Analytics: A new field for your GTM ID makes it easy to add Google Tag Manager to your Parent Portal for advanced user tracking & analytics!

Bug Fixes

• Expired bank mandate causing NSF fees: Due to some banks and financial institutions recently applying a new mandate, many parents’ autopay information was suddenly no longer usable. These institutions now put a limit to autopay information validity, and to avoid NSF fees, we’re now actively disabling autopay accounts before their mandates run out, notifying parents via a system email and asking them to add their information once again.
• Communication Plan triggers included checklist items from deleted terms: We are now no longer showing these items, and are including the term in parentheses next to each activated/available checklist item, so ones with duplicate names can be distinguished more easily. 
• Refund billing items could be deleted: They now cannot be deleted or edited, ensuring that the paper trail for refunds remains accurate. 
• Calendars that didn’t use a custom appointment form created inquiries with many blank fields: We now have a default short form, so that inquiries created via this form do not have any blank fields.