I'm excited to announce today one of the biggest changes we've ever made to one of the most fundamental components of Tula: Our credits system. Beginning today, you can now choose to have regular classes cost any number of credits you like!
Previously, regular classes would always cost one credit, so that when you checked a student into a class, we'd always remove a single credit from the student's account. Now however, in addition to indicating that a class should cost one credit, you can also indicate that you'd like a class to cost 2, 3, 5 or even .5 or 1.5 credits.
This new functionality, combined with the existing ability to create special events where specific passes are tied to specific classes, gives our customers more power and flexibility than ever before. Of course, like everything we do with Tula, the final implementation is easy to use and simple for our customers to set up.
Why the change?
We've long advocated for simplicity and ease of use in our system, and always removing a single credit from a student account when they were checked into a class was one of the ways this philosophy made it into our product. As with everything though, there are tradeoffs.
Sometimes, this simplicity made things more complex in other areas. After numerous conversations with our customers though, it was clear that some people had to use special events as a work-around to charge more money for a class even though they would have preferred for it to remain a regular class.
The result was that for some people, their studio setup was more complicated that it ought to be because they had to use special events more often than they would have liked. This in turn required them to have more passes than they wanted. So a yoga studio that also offered a meditation class for example might have wanted to charge less money for that class - but that required them to make a special event and corresponding pass. This then required people with credits on file to still purchase a separate pass.
Now however, you could simply make that meditation class cost a half a credit if you wanted to.
With this latest release our customers get the best of both worlds: The ability to make individual events remove as few or as many credits as they like, AND the ability to create special events for the times when you truly do want to have specific passes for specific events for things like workshops, retreats and other one off events.
How it works
Like everything we do with Tula, we spent a great deal of time making sure that this new feature was easy to use, and that the interface remained instantly clear when investigating an individual account.
Now, when you create a new event, you'll notice a new field: Class Cost. We default this to one credit, but you can put in anything you like, including half credits.
Once you've created your class, you'll of course be able to see the cost of the class on the main event page / check-in page.
When looking at an individual student account, you'll also be able to see a few new pieces of information. On the attendances tab you'll see the exact cost of an attendance and which pass or collection of passes paid for the attendance (a 3 credit class might be paid for with 2 passes for example) and we now also show on the individual passes exactly how many credits remain on each pass.
More power, more simplicity
With this new feature we've given our customers more power than ever before, while also allowing them to keep their class and pass setups as simple as ever. It's our favorite kind of update and we hope you like it as much as we do!
