End of Year in Discover

[0:00:00]
Candace:   Kia ora koutou. Welcome to our End of Calendar Year in Discover webinar. I hope you can all say that three times fast. I know I struggled to get that out recently. My name is Candace. I am one of the trainers here at Discover. And today I’m excited to take you through some of the things, the processes, the procedures, the things that you might like to do to wrap up the year in the Discover system.

[0:00:28]
I’ll make a start, but I just want to let you know, if you got any questions along the way, please feel free to pop them up in the Q&A section. You’ll see it’s like a little Q&A button at the top of your Teams there. If you have any questions, put them in there and I’ll answer them, at the end of the webinar.

[0:00:47]
So we’ll get stuck into it. I’m just jumping into Discover my test centre here. The data always looks a little bit strange because it’s not real. So, if you see anything weird, just disregard. I suppose the first thing, that would come to everybody’s minds and, and really is the number one thing that you would need to do in Discover to prepare for the end of the year, is updating our calendars. There’s a couple of ways that you can do this. We can do this either at a group level or at a centre level. You’ll see on your left side menu here, if you have access, to your groups or group of centres, it’s going to depend on your permissions, but you can kind of set, the, parameters or the, sort of the specifics of the holiday at a group level. So, you don’t have to go into each individual centre to make those changes it and it would be time consuming.

[0:01:51]
At a group level, we’re going to come in here to group and then group calendar. Give that a second to load. You can see I’ve got a couple of things, already set up there. I’m just going to pop a little entry in here just so we can see what it looks like to start fresh. Click on my day and then we’re going to create our calendar entry. Now this is going to apply to all of the centres in your group. You can have a holiday period, or you can have your stat holiday. However, you… if you’re shutting down for like a couple of weeks, pop in your holiday period. If you’re shutting down for just the key days, your stat holiday, up to you. Let’s give it a name and then you can either leave it on just one day or you can set it for a week long if you’re shutting down for a little while.

[0:03:05]
Okay, and then you’ve got your blue banners here. These are going to guide you, with regards to your funding. So, if you’re open, amazing. And you’ll see that when I tick that on and off, you’re going to get this little attendance only pop up down the bottom there. But let’s, let’s just say you’re closed.

[0:03:27]
And then under here, we’ve got chargeable. So, is it going to be charged or is there no charge? Now, if you’re open, you’ve got that option there, attendance only. And that means, that families will only be charged for the day if their child is signed in and out. if you’ve got them booked in, but they don’t show up, they’re not going to be charged. So that’s an option as well there. I’m just going to say charged just for demonstration’s sake. Now, you’ve got a few other options here. The one that I really want to highlight here is no WINZ payments. Now with your WINZ, if you are only shutting down for, one day, if you’re shutting down for less than a week, we really do not recommend ticking no WINZ payments, and that’s purely because, it’s going to stop your WINZ receipts being created. So, if you’re only shut down for 1 day, it’s going to mess up your whole week. If you’re shutting down, if you’ve got a one-week closure or a two-week closure, you closed for an extended period, you can go ahead and safely tick that box. That will be fine. But if you are having like piecemeal days here and there, leave that off. I would recommend instead, and I’ll show you how to do this, going into child benefactors and making your adjustments there if you need to. So only tick this if you’ve got, like an extended closure.

[0:05:12]
I’m just going to play with my settings a little bit here. Give me a second. Sometimes I click around too much and it, it causes problems. You’ll also have the option of discounting your holiday by ticking the box there. Now this is, what I would say about this one is you can take a percentage. So, you can enter in a percentage in your holiday discount here. And if you’re, when it’s got the little, blue box under here, the default fee discount, what this is referring to, so when you tick holidays discounted and you enter in your percentage there, it’s going to override the discount that is specified in your fee setting. So, for all of your fees, if you have set up or specified in each of those fees that there is a discount, for holidays, that, fee discount will apply, unless you enter in this percentage here. What I would generally say is if you, if you know your discounts and your fees are consistent across the board, great, but if you want everyone to receive the same discount, you can pop in a percentage in here, and it will override that. it will apply 50%, 75 % across the board, no matter what, the fee is.

[0:06:55]
Now it’s a percentage, you can’t specify a dollar amount in here. if that’s something that you would prefer to do, I’m going to show you how to do that as well. I’m just going to pop this in for the moment, I’m going to save it. Whatever settings that you have in here are going to apply across the group. There’s end-of-year webinar, you can always go back in and edit it or delete it if we need to. Before I go on to show you, a little bit more about, different kinds of discounts, so where we can set perhaps a dollar value or something other than a percentage, I’m just going to, jump quickly into our centre calendar. This is going to apply for those of you who don’t have group access or are just an individual centre, not part of a group. And it’s going to look very similar. So, in their centre calendar. Now, if I skip forward on my month there, you can see there, I’ve got end-of-year webinar and that was set at the group level. Now, if your centre is a bit different, to the others in the group, you can actually override these settings, but they’ll, they’re only going to apply to your centre. If everywhere else is closed, and you’re open, you can tick that there. Maybe you’re charging or you’re only doing booked times, that sort of thing. You can adjust your settings at, at a centre level if you need to.

[0:08:30]
I’m going to click save there. And when I do that, see how it turns orange? That’s per our key, centre holiday versus group holiday. Your settings for your centre are overriding this group settings. And you can always, like I said before, you can always edit it if you need to. And if you find out “oops” it wasn’t actually meant to do that, you can delete it, and it will just revert right back to those group settings that were created in the calendar. But otherwise, when you’re creating the holiday entry, this particular pop up here is going to be exactly the same. Whether you’re doing it a group or a centre level.

[0:09:15]
Okay, so, I’m going to move on now to show us a little bit more about these discounts and what we can do with them instead. If you’ve got any questions about, that, about the calendars, excuse me, just don’t forget to pop them in that Q&A there. I’ll be monitoring that, throughout the session.

[0:09:35]
So, discounts. We can set up discounts in our centre settings. If there’s something new that you want to do, or something different that you want to do from the usual, or if you’re a centre that hasn’t really got all of your discounts set up for the year yet. We’re here in centre settings, and then we’re in centre details. And I’m just going to scroll down to our centre holiday section. What I want to point out here is this section here are special discount. You can see in my settings here, I’ve got 50%, 100%. $5. And on the side here, we’ve got a little bit of a guide about how to enter these types of discounts. So, it’s a little bit of, a little bit of a, you just got to make sure that you read this to be sure that you’re putting in the correct figures or symbols to make sure that your discount going to reflect correctly. So, you can see, as opposed to the percentage that we are looking at in the calendar, you can set your dollar values here so you can do hourly as well. The little explanation there says, for example, if you use H2, it shows us $2 an hour discount. So, your H is referring to, hour, and then if you put 50% next to it, 50% of non-attended hours. So, I would encourage you to give this section a read. And, once you’ve decided what your discount is going to be, come in here, separate it with a comma and a space, and then enter the type of discount that you would like to apply. So even though you can’t apply these discounts through the centre calendar, we can apply them elsewhere. Let’s just say I’ve entered that $5 one there. I’m going to scroll down, save, of course. And then we’re going to, there’s a few different ways we can apply this. But if it’s going to be across the board, you don’t want to be going through and doing it individually. So, I’m going to come in here into bulk actions. And then I’m going to select set holidays. This way, what we can do is apply it in bulk, and we have the option, we’ve got all the options that we’ve set in our centre settings, rather than just the percentage amount that applies through the calendar. So, you can do this for, an extended period of time, if you would like. Or you can do it, day by day. If you’re doing piecemeal or individual days, specify holiday there. 50 % discount or sort of whichever one you’ve chosen. Specify your funding situation. Just a quick reminder for everybody, while we’re here, and, I might be, I think we all know this, just in case we don’t, I will just say that for your holiday periods, your funding is going to apply only if you are open. If you’re closed, then it’s not going to apply.

[0:13:22]
When we, when we enter in these dates here in your holiday, it’s going to this children list here is going to capture all of the children that are enrolled and have a booking, in this date range. So, you can go through and individually apply, but I think most of you in this situation are going to be, putting everybody across. So, we’ll click that double arrow there. If you make a mistake, you can always click, on the child, put them back. Oops, excuse me. There we go. But I think it’s going to apply to most. You just do discounts across the board. And then we’re going to click on create bulk holiday. Just going to change my dates there. Let’s do the 27th, not of January. Oh, we are struggling today. There we go. Bulk holiday. Okay, give that a few minutes to process. Now at this point, worth also mentioning, you can actually, so you’ve got your allowed number of holiday days, and you might have seen that in the centre settings earlier. You can specify the number of holidays, that a child is eligible for, in your centre across the year. So, holiday days here, 20 allowed across the centre, that’s the maximum number. A child enrolled full time for the entire year is going to get 20 holiday days. If they’re enrolled in less time than that, they’ll get a percentage of this. If you want to check what everybody’s balances are for holiday days, what you want to do is jump into your reports, children reports, and then we’re going to have a look at our holiday report. And I always lose it. I always lose it here. There it is on the side. Categories, they might be relevant for you, they might not be. We’ll have a look at room and then we can have a look at as of December. Get report. The real column that we’re going to be looking at here is our remaining. We can see how many they have, how many they’ve taken, how many have been discounted or not discounted. And you can, if there’s a family in there that has run out of days and you’re feeling, Oh, it’s the holidays let’s just give them an extra day you can do that. When you’re looking through this report, if you go, all right, let’s, let’s give Lavender an extra day here. Click on Lavender’s name or your child’s name. We’re going to pop in here into their calendar in the profile and, override entitlement. This is the one that we want to look at. So, you’ve got 2024 and 2025 here. I’m just going to have a look at, 2024 override. Based on child’s enrolment centre settings, they’re entitled to one day’s holiday. I want to override it. I’m going to give them some extra to type in your number there, and they’re now eligible, for that, discount. if they weren’t eligible before, they are now, and they will, receive that discount there. Because they weren’t eligible before, it didn’t apply, You can always come back through individually and just check that everyone’s got their discounts as needed. All right.

[0:17:39]
Any questions about, the discounts, pop them in the Q&A. But for now, we’re just going to move on, to invoicing. And look, it’s a very small note, but I want to note it anyway. Centre settings. We’re going to come down to our invoice settings. Now, my recommendation is that you do not stop invoicing over the holidays. It’s not, as it’s not much fun to receive, an invoice or a bill or even a direct debit over the holidays. We all know you’re sitting there, you’re trying to enjoy your boxing day, ham sandwiches, and then oh, invoice. Great. Thanks everybody. No, we still recommend it. Just, you don’t want to go messing with it. It can, create confusion. So if you’re on automatic invoicing and you just don’t want your families to receive those invoices over the holidays, instead of just parting it off entirely, what I would recommend is, instead you can just tick this box here, email invoices slash statements to the centre only. That way they don’t get it in their email. Like if you, if you really don’t want them to be seeing that on their holidays, they’re not going to see it. And you can always, you know, re send, those, to the families when you’re back in business, when you’re back in the new year and everything’s, everyone’s facing the realities of the post-holiday expenses. So, you would just tick that box there and scroll down. But it’s important to note, as well, when it comes to your WINZ, I mentioned this a little bit earlier. If you’re shutting down completely, in your calendar, you can stop WINZ payments. Otherwise, if you’re going to be around, and you need to make any adjustments to WINZ and there’s only a couple of days that you’re closing down for. Jump into your payments and then into child benefactors. And you can see I’ve just got one there at the moment. If you do need to make any adjustments, for certain weeks you can pop in there and, make, make an edit there with the pencil edit button. You can leave a note there. When you leave the note, family will be able to see it on their invoice, admins will be able to see it, in the receipt section. So, you can make your adjustments to WINZ there if you need to, rather than just shutting down the whole thing and trying to recalculate. If you’re doing WINZ manually, First of all, hats off to you. That’s a, that’s a good chunk of work you’ve got to do. But yeah, this, this might not apply so much to you.

[0:20:35]
Next thing, making children inactive at the end of the year. Of course, we do have to say goodbye to some children. And that’s always hard. That’s always a hard one, but we’ll, we’ll jump into children. And this is the one of the things that I mean, as hard as it is to say goodbye. I’m not talking about sentiment, I’m talking about the ease of which this can be done. If you’ve got a child finishing up, we’re going to click on their name. And we’re just in the child tab here. And what we’re going to do is just come down here to centre details. And we’re going to select our leaving date. Now as soon as you hit that leaving date, or you set it, whatever, you know, whatever that is, we’ll select save. And when we save, I’m not going to do it because I need this child in my centre, when, when we hit save, you don’t need to worry about like, cutting off the enrolments, ending them, finishing, don’t do anything with them. What will happen is once you set that leaving date, it will just end the enrolment, once they have, passed that leaving date. It’s over, it’s done, that’ll be their last day. You just cut it off there. And that’s really all you need to do for your children, who are finishing up.

[0:22:03]
Next up, actually if you’ve got children leaving or if you’ve got sort of late notice that children are going to be leaving, this is an opportunity for you to also just jump into your transition tab and, look at your occupancy and your capacity. And maybe there’s someone who’s on your waitlist who’s really been, needing a spot and this child leaving has, has opened that up. You can always jump into your transitions tab to have a look here if you need to.

[0:22:41]
I go into a lot, I’ve been into a lot more detail about your transitions tab. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do it today, but I did a whole webinar, two webinars actually on the transitions tab. We have the recordings of those available, if you have a look, if you search, calendar, in the support knowledge base, so pop up here into need help. If you search transitions or if you search the calendar, I’ll have the recordings of that transitions webinar up there a little bit later today. You can always have a look at that. That one’s handy. Just helps you find that space for children.

[0:23:20]
Last thing I’m going to touch on super simple, but sometimes we can overlook it. Bulk communication. Just letting your families know about those days that you’re going to be closed. If you want to send out a newsletter. Or if you just want to send out some notes. Anything, that you might want to communicate to the families ahead of time. Bulk communication. Now you can send it to everyone. you can send it to your current bill payers. If it’s about their bills or their invoices, you can send it to the primary caregivers of current children. And it’s just going to create a filter down here of who receives this. I think importantly, what we want to look at here is your enrolled, between. So, I’ll pop that in there and you just capture everyone, who’s going to be enrolled over that holiday period. Now you can do it. Look, I think email for this one is, I mean, you can always, if you’re using Home, you can put it is an app message or app alert if they’re a bit smaller. If you’re, if you’re connected with Twilio, you can do an SMS, you can have it pop up on the tablet, but I think, email, is the, the demo that we’re just going to go with today, I think most people would send an email for this sort of thing. Send from name, send to admin or whatever your name is, whatever you want the name you want it to come from. And you can specify what email it’s going to come from as well, pop your subject in. It’s just going to type in the email in the brain. I’ve said it too many times. You know, when you say a word so many times, it’s lost all its meaning. That’s me. Right. There we go. Hop in all of our recipients, similar to before, and you can do your email, all your formatting and everything, pop all of your information in here. Or if you’ve got a nice cute little PDF or something that you’ve created, you can always pop that in there as well. And I love this so much, you can do a test. Because how many times have we sent out something thinking that it’s all correct and then you look at it and it’s not. So, test email and you can, of course, do your preview as well, if you need, and then send that off. Everyone’s up to date. They know about the closures, any discounts that apply, that sort of thing. That’s, that’s it for your end of year in Discover.

[0:25:51]
Remember, if you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the Q&A. I can see that we’ve got a question there.

[0:25:57]
If your centre closes for four weeks, is there any benefit to separating the stat days out in the calendar? Look, I’m a bit of a stickler. For, for having things accurate, particularly when we’re talking about funding, when we’re talking about records. For me personally, I would be separating out your stat days, just so it’s really, really clear. So, if I jump into, centre, centre calendar. If you’ve got holidays around it, you can just create the holidays, like 31st of December, and then 2nd, 3rd, 4th, whatever, I, I would separate them, personally. That’s what I would do. Okay. All right. Any other questions, please pop them in the Q&A.

[0:26:54]
If there’s nothing else, I’ll be here for another minute or two, if there’s anything else that can help with, let me know. Otherwise, thank you so much, everyone. Doing these webinars this year has been really lovely. We’ve still got a couple more. We’ve got our quarterly wrap up that’s happening on the 4th of December, and we also have our expert hours. These are days you can come in, you can ask any kind of question as long as it’s not, you know, they are sort of public. If you’ve got information you want to keep private about certain accounts, we can’t cover that. But if you just want to know how to do something, jump into the expert hours. You can find those again, if you jump into support, and you, search for the training calendar like this. You can get the link to sign up for those. Please come along, ask any questions, you might have, about processes or procedures, and I’ll hope to see you there. I think that’s it from everybody, so we’ll leave it there.

[0:27:48]
Enjoy the rest of your day, and I’ll up with you later. Thanks everyone. Bye.