Hi Everyone,

This week we’re rolling out a number of changes to TutorBird based on your feedback.

Here’s what’s new and improved this week:

• We’ve added the ability to customize the SMS Reminders from the “School Settings” page on the “Messaging” tab. You’ll see a new section labelled “System SMS Templates“. Editing this is just like editing an email template (though HTML formatting is not available because they are not applicable to SMS messages).
• When TutorBird is unable to deliver an SMS Reminder to a student or parent, it will now appear in your Notification page like an undelivered email.
• We’ve updated the way “Full” events are shown/hidden on the Student Portal Calendar to eliminate some confusion. This small change will hide some events that were previously automatically visible in the Student Portal, but students couldn’t actually join.
• In the auto-invoice email summary, we fixed the “Balances” so that they’re calculated correctly if you have “Include Previous Balance” turned OFF in your invoice settings. (The invoices themselves were always correct, but the email summary sent to the teacher could have shown the wrong amounts.)
• If you change your auto-invoice settings, TutorBird will now resend you the email summary based on your new settings for the families that have been updated.
• We’ve added a new “Week” version of the printed calendar. This is available from the “Calendar” page under the “Print” drop down button. This is great if you need to post a printed room or teacher schedule on a door.

Payroll Changes:

• We’ve added the ability to override teacher payroll settings by Event Category. Here’s the new options:
  • Basic Increase – Adds a fixed amount to a teacher’s payroll entry for this event. This is useful if you add a flat travel fee for in-home lessons (e.g. $5)
  • Per Student – This allows you to calculate teacher’s pay based on the number of attendees (e.g. $5/student for group lessons)
  • Per Hour – This overrides the teacher’s payroll settings with a new hourly rate (e.g. $30/hr).
  • Percentage of Revenue – This overrides the teacher’s settings with a percentage of the school revenue from that event (e.g. 75% of school revenue).

This feature is available to multi-teacher schools only and can be configured by editing your Event Categories (Calendar > Event Setup).

• We’ve added some new tools to the Teachers and Administrators page:
  • You can now bulk add payroll entries based on the current payroll balance. This allows you to add a payroll entry to each selected teacher without going into their individual profiles. You can select all teachers with the check-boxes and click “Add Payroll Entry“. TutorBird will automatically add entries for paying everyone based on their visible Payroll balance.
  • If you make changes to the Payroll by Event Category (as described above), you can make those changes retroactive in bulk by using the “Tools > Apply Payroll Settings” button.
• On the Payroll tab of the Teacher Details page, there’s a new column labelled “Source” that indicates where a payroll entry came from. This will indicate if a payroll entry was calculated using the teacher’s default payroll settings, the Event Category payroll settings or a manual entry.
• We’ve added a Visible Columns button to the Payroll tab on the Teacher Details page so you can selectively show/hide columns.

We hope you enjoy this weeks updates.

– The TutorBird Team

Did you know? You can now setup auto invoicing. It can even be setup on a family by family basis. Read all the auto invoicing faq’s here.