Your Illumine.app experience is improving as we work to release new features, enhance existing ones, and squash bugs - cause we love good buggers but we hate bugs. Here’s an account of the improvements you’ll find in the latest release, October 2022.
1. Fees → Student Billing
As part of the latest update, we have relooked at the ‘Student Billing’ section under the ‘Fees’ module of the illumine app. Admins now get a quick view of overall payment status, invoice creation now has a full screen view, and all upcoming invoices listed upfront.
Let’s dive right in!
The Student Billing section now has a clean and quick view of the overall payment status of your childcare center. It shows upfront the total amount generated, amount paid, amount pending and total credit, with various filters to get a segmented view at group, program or room levels in the selected date range.
Before the current update, when you clicked “Create Invoice”, there used to be a popup window where users could generate the invoice. However, many of our existing users were not particularly happy with the UI, which is why the current release has updated the UI to now show the “Create Invoice” section as a full screen view.
Note - You get the ‘Create Invoice’ option on the top right, on both the Student Billing and the Invoices sections under the Fees module.
You can now also see the student's payment status at the overall student levels, as well as the profile level of individual students. The payment status now has color codes and shows the action buttons upfront. A Due status appears during the payment window between invoice generation and last date, while the Overdue status indicator will appear once due date set is past.
The student Invoice page has been reorganized to clearly show Generated Invoices, Upcoming Invoices, Deposit, Credit, Fee Plan and Payment Methods – upfront and easy to understand!
The ‘Upcoming Invoice’ section shows the invoices that will be generated based on the fee plan assigned to the student.
Additionally, you can now easily jump to another student’s invoice page using the search bar on top-right of the page.
2. Lead CRM
Growing your business is important, and this month’s update is just the thing you need!
Starting immediately, you can now send emails to your leads straight from Illumine.app itself. Not just sending emails, you can now also design your own templates while reaching out to your potential customers. Besides emails, Lead Forms also get an upgrade – you can now customize their styling and also enable/disable themes.
Let’s dig in!
The Leads module now has a new subsection called Email Template, where you can create templates for different types of communications to your potential future customers. While the template currently supports only plain text emails, we will soon be coming up with a rich email template builder.
These Email Templates are then accessible while sending emails to each lead, under the Email tab of their profile. Should you choose, you can also write your own email instead of using the template.
Above is an example of how the email looks like.
Forms have also been updated in this release. You now have the power to control the styling of the forms, as well as enable/disable them as per requirement.
3. Activities
You now have an additional filter option within activities - “Activities with attachment”. You can also view a student within a particular day’s activity page.
Let’s dig in!
Activities with attachment gives you the ability to search quickly
4. Attendance
The student attendance module now has a fresh look with a clickable dashboard - with all options shown upfront.
Let’s dig in!
The student attendance dashboard has a revamped UI with all options shown upfront, including a clickable “On leave today” callout that shows the students on leaves with reason on the same screen.
5. Other Enhancements
Visual upgrades throughout illumine.app web
Parent Communication - Option to delete messages
Parent Communication - Count of unread messages in the side panel
Settings Module - Option to switch off birthday emails, configure late fee as fixed or percentage amount; new forms option to customize activities, leads, check-in/checkout forms; reset password while logged in.
Management → Program - Option to run programs with no end date. Entry and exit into programs based on the student's age and age range set for the program.
Student Profile - you now have a student gallery with all media associated with students shown in it, with the option to download photos/videos from the student gallery.
Student Profile - Moved to full-page edit experience.
Dashboard - Now has an additional graphic representation for signed-up vs pending parents.
Invite - the section now shows the last invite status & date, and the option to send the invite from the installation page to a particular student.
The UI has visual upgrades including the following - status with color codes, action buttons shown upfront
Parent Communication - Option to delete messages for both the parent side and the school/teacher side.
Parent Communication - The Count of unread messages can now be seen in the left panel of the Illumine web portal.
Settings Module - This module has undergone quite a few small but necessary upgrades. Admins now have the option to switch off birthday emails, configure late fees as fixed or percentage amount, use new forms option to customize activities, leads, check in/checkout forms, and reset password while still being logged in.
Management → Program
With the current release, users now have the option to run programs with no end date. Students enter and exit the program based on their age and the age range set for the particular program. This allows you to easily manage students in various perennially running programs without the manual hassle of adding each student to different programs.
Besides using age range for a particular program, the old option of setting custom end dates continues to be there. Simply uncheck the checkbox of ‘Program has no end date’
Bug Fixes
Search functionality had an issue of removing the applied filters on clicking ‘back’. That has been fixed.
Illumine Version
Version 2.27.6