One of the toughest problems we've had to sink our teeth into is registrations. Making it even tougher is our belief that your students shouldn't be required to create accounts with us, just to interact with your business. And making it tougher still is the fact that many of our customers have been asking for the ability to require payments to certain classes, in order to allow students to register for them.
We've been thinking about this problem for a long, long time.
A new solution is here!
Today we are proud to announce an entirely new set of features to the Tula registration system that will allow you to do the following:
- Continue to accept immediate registrations by your students, whether logged into Tula or not.
- Continue to accept payments from students via the payment form, without requiring login.
- New Feature: Require a student to have credits on file in order to register for a class
- New Feature: Prompt a student to purchase a pass if they go to register for a class that requires payment
- New Feature: Prompt students to register for classes after purchasing a pass via the payment form.
- New Feature: Allow you to mark a student as a no-show, which will remove a credit from their account, but keep them from counting as an attendance in your reports.
- New Feature: Allow admins and desk people to close registrations on a class whenever they like.
- All of the above available for both regular classes and special events
Together, this new set of features represents the single largest release we've ever put together, but what makes us so happy, is that in order to begin leveraging this new functionality, all you need to do is edit a class, and click on a radio button.
That's it. To begin requiring payment for any of your classes, all you need to do is edit the class, and choose to require payment in order to register.
How it works
When you create or edit a class, in addition to the Calendar Settings you've always had, there's now one more option: "Require payment in order to register?". When "Yes" is selected to require payment, we will only allow a student to register for a class if they have credits on file.
Importantly, this means that if they attempt to register for a class and they are not logged in, they will have to log in, so that we know their current credit count.
Directing your students around your website
With this new functionality, you might want to consider updating the language on your websites in certain places.
For new students, you'll want to point them to the payment form, as they don't have accounts yet. Our payment form has been modified so that once someone purchases a pass, they can register for the number of classes equal to the pass they are purchasing. For example, if you have a special event series with 5 classes, and someone buys a 3-pack to that special event, they'll be able to register for up to 3 classes in that special even series.
For existing students, while they can of course use the payment form, if they log in they'll be able to register for classes with the click of a button, they'll be able to instantly make payments if they're out of credits, etc.
In short, when requiring payment in order to register for a class, send new students to your payment form and send existing students to the calendar.
Screenshots
Check out some screenshots below with annotations, to see the different views people will get based on whether they're logged in, logged out, using the calendar or using the payment form.
Enable all these features by clicking a single radio button!
Loads of features enabled by answering a single question!
Changes to iOS available soon
These changes are all accounted for on the iOS applications, however if you require payment for a class, your students on iOS that don't have credits will simply not be able to register. Our updated app will be available soon, but it's pending Apples approval.
We have a philosophy that the browser doesn't wait for iOS, so while your students won't be able to register for classes that require payment, they won't get proper error messages until our newest version is approved. We don't like to have breakages anywhere, but we were willing to make this trade-off to get the feature out today.
More work to do!
As large as this release is, we still have a lot more features, functionality and refinements that we'll continue to bring! Please let us know what you like, what you want improved and how you're using this in the wild. We can't wait to hear what you think!
One Final Feature!
As a result of doing all this work, we're able to give you one final feature a lot of you have been asking for - the ability to create multiple payment forms with specific passes on them available for purchase. We're considering this a power user feature and it's sort of hidden in the website widgets section.
By going to the custom form builder, you can create and build a payment form with a set of passes, and, you can put a custom prompt in the dropdown that prompts people to make a purchase.
To all of our customers that have asked for these features so they can run their businesses better, we send you a huge thank you! We couldn't build this without you!