A parent tag (DD filter field) can currently be used to group families; on the

  • parent screen,
  • direct debit extract,
  • balance owing report, and
  • invoice statements.

If you go to the parent screen (People-> Parents), the right most column is TAG. When a parent has had the Direct Debit filter field setup, on the parent’s DirectDebit TAB, the list of Tags will show in this column.

Parent Screen

Parent DD TAB

You can use the tag on the parent screen to group families for re-enrolment & sending PINs

The parent TAG gets set up in the Parent’s Direct Debit TAB using the DD filter field (and can be setup regardless if the service or parent is using Direct Debit or not). It’s a text field and therefore any word or number or mixture of letters/numbers can be used.

The TAG is designed to help, not make you have an admin nightmare. So just be cautious about setting up too many groups, which doubles, triples, etc your admin load. The more groups you have the more times you may need to run DD extract or the invoices, unless you use ALL for both frequency and filter.

A tip is to run the weekly and fortnightly (frequency filter) groups on the same day, thereby you still only run everything once.

Some examples follow of how the Parent Tag (DD filter) can be used.

Invoice Extract DD extract Screen Balance Owing Rpt

Examples

Some services use it to group families for direct debit extracts, combined with the frequency of extraction. Eg. Weekly (frequency) Monday (filter) group.

Many use the filter to identify an Active family vs an InActive family. So you can run Invoices for all families.

And, Then if something doesn’t look right on the review of their DD extract or Invoice extract, before sending the invoices or the DD batch, they exclude those families by labelling their TAG as OnHold.

If you just want to exclude a family from the DD run you can untick the DD box, however for invoices you do need to change the TAG.

If a group of families were OnHold, you could run the DD extract and Invoice statements for the Active group, so you don’t hold up everyone else whose balance looks OK.

Then you can sort out the OnHold group - get support to investigate their balance, etc - and then once solved, you can run Invoices/DD extract for the OnHold group, before returning those families back to the Active group.

Next run would again be for the Active group.