Happy Monday from the TutorBird team! The sun is shining, the coffee pot is brewing and we’ve got some shiny new updates for you. Someone wise once said “Good things come to those who wait”, and we’re here to reward everyone’s patience. This week’s most exciting feature is something that many of you have asked for… hourly billing! When assigning students their default billing rate, you’re now able to charge students by the hour. If the duration of a lesson is updated, the lesson cost will automatically adjust to the correct rate.

This week’s changes also includes improvements to the Sign-Up form so parent addresses are recorded with more precision when submitted. Additionally when viewing a Family Account page for both the teacher and Student Portal, all event entries now include the lesson time and duration within the fee description (and closely matches how it appears on an invoice).

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been working on, check out the full list of updates below.

Here are our latest improvements:

• Hourly billing is here! You can now set up your students with an hourly rate, so the fee they pay will automatically adjust based on the length of the lesson on the calendar.
• The Family Account page, on both the teacher and Student Portal sides now includes the lesson time and duration in the fee description (similar to how it’s presented on the invoice).
• The new Sign-Up form now includes the parent address automatically if you’re collecting credit card details on the form.
• If you’re collecting credit card details from the Sign-Up form, and the parent leaves Address Line 2 blank, it no longer creates a blank line (with just a comma) in the parent details.
• We made a handful of behind the scenes SEO improvements to TutorBird hosted websites. They now interact better with crawlers, like Googlebot, when invalid or incorrect URLs are requested.
• When adding files to the Online Resources page, we’ve adjusted the “New File Available” email to use the school email address if the teacher doesn’t have permission to view student/parent email addresses.

Here’s what we’ve fixed:

• We fixed an issue with the Bulgarian date format that would prevent the Calendar from displaying correctly.
• We fixed an issue that could cause fixed monthly charges to remain after switching a student to no-automatic charges (even after clicking the “Apply Changes” button).
• We fixed an issue that could prevent events with attendees from being deleted from the calendar if the “Per Hour without Attendees” payroll override option was used.
• We fixed a potential issue that could prevent deleting events with sales tax, and boosted the speed of deleting recurring events by 3-5x.

Did you know? In-app and email notifications will now provide you with the same, detailed information when a student fills out your Sign-Up form.