Hello everyone, this week we’re introducing a powerful new feature in TutorBird: partial make-up credits. Most of you won’t notice any difference, but if you’re a tutor that teaches varying lesson lengths, this will make your life a little easier (and your tutoring business run more equitably).

Partial Make-Up Credits

In a nutshell, if a student is given a make-up credit for a 30 minute lesson, they now get a make-up credit worth 30-minutes of make-up time. Similarly, if a student is given a make-up credit for a 60 minute lesson, they can use that to sign-up for 60-minutes of make-up lessons. If you only give 30-minute lessons to everyone, you won’t notice any difference.

For tutors with varying length lessons you no longer need to worry about students with longer lessons getting short changed with shorter make-up lessons. Similarly, students with shorter lessons can no longer sign-up for a longer make-up lesson slot (unless they have enough make-up credits to cover the time). TutorBird will keep track of everything so that you don’t have to.

Here are a couple of common scenarios:

• A student who cancels two 30-minute lessons can now sign up for one 60-minute make-up lesson.
• A student who cancels one 30-minute lesson cannot sign up for a 60-minute make-up lesson.
• A student who cancels one 60-minute lesson can sign up for two 30-minute make-up lessons.

If you teach varying length lessons, you may see partial make-up credits in your student list (for example, “0.5 make-up credits”). This will happen if a student is issued 60-minutes of make-up time, but has only redeemed 30-minutes. The value of one full make-up credit is based on the student’s default lesson length.

Confused? Don’t be. As mentioned above, most tutors won’t notice this change. Tutors with busy businesses will benefit by knowing that TutorBird is managing their time behind the scenes instead of just whole “credits”.

Other Changes This Week

• We’ve made some adjustments to improve long pop-up windows on iOS and Android. Now, the popup window should scroll instead of the background if you touch outside the popup.
• We’ve moved the “Hide Full” button on the Calendar to the “Filter” popover, and added a new “Hide Empty” option which allows you to hide empty events. If your calendar has a lot of empty makeup slots you can hide them and view only the lessons you’re actually teaching.
• We improved the layout of the “Import Students” page so that it works better on mobile devices (and it looks a little less cluttered).
• Now payments can be recorded for students who pay a flat monthly rate directly from the “Attendance” popup. (Previously this feature was limited to students who pay based on the number of lessons.)
• For multi-teacher/tutor studios, the “Income & Expense Report” (and chart) now show accrued payroll when displayed in “Accrual” mode.

We hope you find this week’s updates and changes helpful. Have a great week!

– The TutorBird Team