Hi Everyone,

This week we’re pleased to announce that we’re beta testing “Substitute Teacher” support for multi-teacher schools. This allows one teacher in your school to fill in for another, without the need to reassign the student to the substitute. We hope that this change will improve the ease of use for multi-teacher schools by allowing you to more easily make scheduling adjustments when a teacher is absent.

This feature comes with a number of related improvements:

• Make-up credits can be used and will correctly deduct from the number of make-up credits owed by the original teacher.
• Payroll will automatically be adjusted in most cases. For ambiguous cases (such as teachers who are paid a percentage of school revenue with students who pay a flat monthly rate), stub entries will automatically be inserted in the teacher’s payroll log which you can update accordingly.
• Substitute teachers can be assigned from either the “Event Details” page or by drag and dropping from the calendar. (To use the “Drag and Drop” option you must toggle this behavior from the buttons located at the bottom of the calendar page.)
• School reports have been updated so that “Billable Hours” and “Lessons Taught” are attributed to the teacher who actually taught the lesson.

Currently this feature is opt-in. If you wish to help us beta test this feature, please email support@tutorbird.com and we’ll get this enabled for your school!

Other changes this week:

• When a new item is added to the Download Library, the “Notify Students” checkbox is now always unselected by default to reduce the risk of accidentally notifying your students before you’re ready to do so.
• The sign-up email that you receive when a new student signs up now correctly states that the student profile is “Active” if you have “Auto-Active” enabled for your sign-up page.
• On the sign-up page the “Gender” field has been renamed “Student Gender” for clarity.
• On mobile devices the invoice drop-down menu should no longer be cut-off if there is only one invoice in the family list.
• We adjusted the Student Login email template so that the login URL is always a clickable hyperlink.
• We added an option to delete/deactivate students in bulk from the “Tools” menu on the Student List page.
• We fixed an issue with the “Make-Up Credits (Unscheduled)” option that would cause it to display all zeros in some circumstances.
• We adjusted the behavior of the bulk attendance options (on the Home page) so that make-up credits won’t be issued in bulk for events in categories that do not allow make-up credits.
• We made a small adjustment to the auto-invoice behavior: If your school’s “Negative Invoices” setting is set to “Show as $0.00 due” and “$0 invoices” is disabled in your Auto-Invoice settings, then no invoices will be generated for families with a positive balance.
• Invoices generated in Expanded format will now display scheduled lessons that require a make-up credit (they will appear as $0 line items).
• If you’re using a TutorBird hosted website, your “Blog” page can now have some content at the top of the page that will be displayed above the blog posts.

Did you know?  It’s no longer necessary to use the checkboxes to download the “Invoice Details“. If no invoices are manually selected, all invoices are included in the download.