End of Calendar Year in Office

[00:00:00] 
Natasha:   Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Tash, and I am an Xplor training specialist and today I have the privilege of taking you through the end of calendar year in Office webinar.

[00:00:20] 
I’d first like to take us through acknowledgement of country. I would like to show my respect and acknowledge the Quandamooka people as the traditional custodians of the lands, winds and waters from where I gather today. I extend my acknowledgement to the traditional custodians throughout Australia, celebrating their diversity, culture and ongoing connections to lands, winds and waters throughout Australia, including where you gather from today. I pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging, extending that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples joining us today.

[00:00:58] 
Excellent. As always, we are all about connection and connecting with our customers during these webinars, so, if you would like to interact with us, if you have questions on any of the content that we’re about to go through, Please feel free to pop your questions into the Q&A box. You will find that on your team’s menu bar under Q&A. So, it’ll look like this one here. At the end, I will have some designated time where I’ll be able to go through and answer your questions live. Alternately, we have opened the chat up as well. So, if you’d like to connect with other persons who have joined us today, let everyone know what service you’ve come from. If you’d like some user experience, or you’ve got questions that you’d like to ask other services that are online today, please feel free to jump into the chat and you’ll be able to connect with one another in there.

[00:01:50] 
Excellent. So, as I mentioned, today’s webinar is all around end of calendar year in Office. So, what that means is I’m going to be taking you through the best practice when it comes to communicating service closures with your families, pausing payments, whether that’s on a family level or for your whole service that is using our integration with Debit Success through Xplor Pay. We’re going to talk through adjusting and archiving of fees. We’ll also, go through updating children’s rooms on their profiles ahead of the new year, deleting bookings from Master Role for any centre closures that you might have, and then finally, we’ll talk about ending care for individual children who won’t be coming back after the holiday break or who are ending care in January, so, you can get ahead of the tasks that you might need to do in order to successfully end their care on their last day of attendance with you.

[00:02:51] 
Excellent. Without further ado, let’s jump live into our Office platform and we can run through exactly all the topics I just noted. Okay, so, when we’re in our Office system, the first thing that we should be looking towards is how to communicate with our families if we are having any closures over the holiday period. That means if you’re closing over exclusively just the public holidays, if you have, two weeks or three weeks that the service closes, we really need to be notifying our families. And in order to do that, the best place in which you would place this notification is through your Comms Centre. So, if we come into Comms Centre here and we go into the orange new button under Posts, this is a great way to be communicating the dates in which you will be closed. So, popping your title in here, we might title this holiday closures. You can go through and add all of your families in here because this might be relevant for everybody. In your body of text, you might put the details in here around the service closures date. If it’s just the public holidays, you might put those dates. If you are closing for a span of time, you might put the date range in which you’re closing in here. You can also, attach any relevant information that you’d like in here as well through URLs and you’ve also, got photo options. So, just adding your body of content in here. If you would like to add a cover photo just to give that pop of colour, you absolutely can. This might be a really great time to be using things like, a Christmas PNG or, if you’ve got your invite for end of year graduation or whatever it might be, you might want to draw awareness by putting that cover photo on here as well. As always, you’ve got the option to send to email as well as Home app, so, by default everything will go through to the Home app under admin posts for families to review. You can also, select to have your commenting public or you can disable. If you were just wanting to identify closures, you might disable and if families have further questions, that will prompt them to come through to your admin team at the service. You can add any attachments in here, so, if you do have things that you’d like families to be reviewing, whether that’s your graduation invites, your vacation care programs that you might be adding, your end of year checklist your new year checklist, if you’ve got an invite to a Christmas party that might be upcoming, you can attach all of those in here. You’ve got a limit of up to 10 attachments, and again, they just need to be in this format here in order to be successfully sent. So, once you’ve added all of that detail in there, you might publish this out to your families. Again, this is a really great way to be communicating your service closures for the end of calendar year with families. Again, if that’s just your public holidays or if you have a set period of time, it draws families back to that one true source of information, which is the Home app, which is where they’re finding everything related to your service. So, hit publish and that can go out to your families.

[00:06:11] 
Now once you’ve communicated your service closures with families, it would be really key as well to potentially close off your rooms. So, this is going to mitigate families being able to firstly book into your service or make a booking request for days that you are closed. It also, means that you won’t be able to add anything into the Master Role. So, when we’re talking about room closures, this falls under settings, room settings, and then in your closure list. In here, we’ll press the bottom right at and then we could put in our closure name. In your categories, these are what you establish. So, you will create your categories by typing in the category name and then they will appear in the dropdown moving forward. So, what category are we putting this closure under? So, this could be public holidays, we’ve got extreme weather in there currently, but for yourselves you can determine what the category will be. It really helps with reporting and also, historically going back and reviewing any of this information, especially if you’re just searching under a particular category. For this one I’m just going to put public holiday in. We’re going to put our closure date range. So, for this end of year closure, I am going to close my service for two weeks, so, we’re going to close from Monday the 23rd of December, and then we’re going to have that closure continue until Sunday the 5th of January. So, that means that the service will reopen on the 6th of January, being that Monday. Once ready, I’m going to create the closure. So, this is how it will look, and then I can add my rooms in here. Now, your room closures can be inputted at a provider level, as long as in your dropdown you are selected under all services. If you are under a particular service, then you will only have access to the rooms under that service level. Pressing on add/remove rooms that will open up your categories in here and you can tick the rooms that this will apply to because it is a full service closure. I’m going to tick all rooms in this instance. Save selected and I can see them all in there.

[00:08:36] 
As this is an upcoming event, you do have the ability to come back in and rename your closure or recategorise. So, if you’ve selected public holiday but actually, you’d like to create a new category being service closures, you could come back and update that right up until this goes live. If you do make any updates, just make sure that you’re pressing on the orange update button. It will let you know if you haven’t made any changes that there’s nothing to update. And then you’ll be able to see your closures listed in the system here. The categories under closure status expired means that this was a previous room closure that has already run, and it has now ceased. Your upcoming is categorised in purple, so, it makes it really easy to be able to see what a future room closure looks like and again, go in and make any edits that you might need to for that one. And then active is green, so, that is one that is currently running.

[00:09:32] 
You do have the ability to filter in here, so, you can filter via your closure category type. You do have your date ranges in here, your service type as well if you’re looking from a provider perspective, and you can also, categorise by room type and by status as well. So, really easy to be able to find your room closures that you’ve placed on your system as well, especially if you’ve got quite a few, because you will have full historic access to all room closures in the system here. So, really key when you’re communicating with your families around when the service is going to be closed that you would also, go through and place a closure on here to ensure that no bookings can be made for this period.

[00:10:14] 
If you don’t want to be using the closure setting that’s absolutely okay, you can actually go through in your rooms list and for each individual room scroll to the bottom and you’ll be able to set your capacity as zero. It will also, come up as zero. Families won’t be able to make a casual booking. They won’t see that there’s any space available at your service. You can do a set date range in one go by selecting date range here, inputting the dates that you want covered. This would be the 23rd through to the 5th. And set your capacity to zero. Save changes. It’s going to populate letting you know that you’re moving from a capacity of 30 to 0. Are we sure that we want to save this action? Yes, we do. And then we can go through to that date range, and we’ll be able to see it here. Now, if you do set a room closure, then you will see that you’ll have a black dot assigned to these dates, which lets you know that the room is closed. It will also, grey it out, but if you choose not to close the room then setting the capacity to zero means that families will not be able to book in over that time. So, some really great options in there.

[00:11:31] 
Now we’ve gone through how to communicate with families. We’ve gone through room closures and setting your capacity to zero. If you are closing over a holiday period and you won’t be charging families because the services closed for say a two week period versus just the public holidays, you’ll also, need to go over to Master Roll and just make sure that you have removed the bookings off the system. So, on your menu bar, just selecting Master Roll. In your calendar, we’re going to move forward to the weeks that we’re applying this to. So, I’m going to apply from the 23rd of December. I can see that there’s bookings in the system here. I can see that I also, have 25 active children for this week. So, I’m going to tick all children quickly here. I’m going to select delete. I’m going to again, put that date range in which we will be closed. So, I’m running off that we’re closing for a two-week period, so, from the 23rd, and we’re closing through to the 5th of January. I’m going to leave Monday through Friday in here because I would like to delete all bookings that fall in the week, Monday to Friday. But if you do charge or will be open on the Mondays or Tuesdays, you can easily remove those days in here and they won’t be included in that deletion. It will let you know how many bookings you have based on the date range that you’ve inputted and the children that you’ve selected over here. So, once ready, you can select on preview, you can select all bookings quickly at the top, and press delete, and they will be removed off your system. By removing the bookings off Master Roll, it means that families are not being charged for those sessions. If you are closing you wouldn’t be charging for those sessions, so, it is really key to remove them. If you are only closed for the public holiday period however and you will be open all other operating days and you may be charging for those public holidays, instead of deleting the bookings, you may want to come into your Master Roll and instead mark them as absent because you will be closed on those days. So, let’s just assume that Tuesday the 17th of December is a public holiday. Coming in, selecting all children, pressing on edit putting in that date range. So, again, December 17th is the one that I’m looking at here. So, I’m exclusively just looking at that week, so, I’m going to put the 16th through to the 22nd. And I’m going to delete all other days because the Tuesday is the public holiday exclusively. In the edit operation box in the dropdown, I’m going to change this to an absence. It is going to allow me to apply a CCS reason. Now because this is a national public holiday, it isn’t a requirement for you to go through and apply the reason. That reason is picked up from Centrelink because it is a national public holiday. However, free, you can go through and add these in if required, so, you’ve got all your reasons in here.

[00:14:34] 
You do also, have the ability to change the fee. So, if your service offers a reduced fee on public holidays, in the dropdown, you can also, select that fee reduction. And that will apply to all the bookings for all the children that have a session on Tuesday the 17th, which is what we’re applying this absent to. Once you’ve imported both of those, we can select on preview. It’s going to list all of the sessions that this is applicable to. I’m going to quickly tick all of those and I’m going to change them to an absence. And then we can see there, those children are now marked as absent. They will not be expected for the day. So, you can go in and do that now ahead of the December and January closures. You could do that a week out, two weeks out. If you don’t go through and mark the days as absent, that’s absolutely okay. They will remain in a booking status which will be this honeycomb colour when they are sent off to Centrelink at the end of the week. However, they will instantly be marked as absent for Centrelink because they don’t have a sign in or out time. So, it would just be for your record keeping that you might want to update these, but if you do forget, they’ll instantly be marked as absent.

[00:15:53] 
Excellent. So, in terms of Master Roll, they would be the actions that you would want to be looking at for end of year if you’re closing. You might want to mark your children as absent. If you have a closure period, you might want to be deleting your bookings off the system. Everything that you do in Master Roll is audited and you can find it in your audit log by coming up to your settings toggle, which is the green top right button. You’ll instantly be landed in your audit log, so, you’ll be able to see anything that you have changed, updated, edited, added in Master Roll. It’s all listed in here, so, if you’d like to go through and see what you’ve marked as absent, which bookings you’ve deleted, who they applied against, you can see them in here just pressing on the three dots. it will give you that detailed overview. So, you have full historic access to your audit log. You can search by an admin name, a child’s name, the booking number if you have that, and you’ll be able to go through and find any relevant information quite quickly. You can also, segment your view by a created, updated, or deleted by ticking any of these and pressing on search. Otherwise, the coloured dots next to the action item apply to the Action type, which you’ll see at the top here.

[00:17:21] 
Excellent. Perfect. Over the holiday period, you may also, want to be pausing family payments. If you are integrated with Xplor Pay, then you will have automated scheduled payments in your system. Families will only be charged what they owe. So, if you do close over the holiday period, so, if you are closing for two weeks, it is a great way to be collecting debt from family by having their payments still go through. If, however, you do not have any administrators that will be monitoring these payments and you don’t feel comfortable with those automatically going through while you’re away, you can pause at both a family level and at a service level. If we’re wanting to pause payments at a service level, so, nothing runs over a set period of time, you can do that by navigating to settings, service settings, coming into your payment integrations, scrolling down, and it’s paused payments here. By pausing payments, no automatic scheduled payments will be generated over the date ranges that you put in here. So, it’s a great way to ensure that over the two weeks that you might be closed, no families are going to be paying any money. You’ll put your start date in here. So, when do we want to start this pause payment and for the end of year, it might be from the 23rd and we might end that pause payment on the 5th of January. Like everything in your Office system, we look at a week as Monday through Sunday, so, you’ll need to select that Monday through Sunday date range. Once you’ve inputted your pause payment date range and you’re happy with that, you can press on save. You’ll be able to see it added to your pause payment history log. As it’s an upcoming one, you’ll see it’s the most recent, so, it’ll sit at the top, but it’s also, upcoming. You do have the option to delete it if you’ve made a mistake prior to it commencing. If you delete it after it has commenced, it will delete off your pause payments history log. However, say I deleted on the 24th of December, the payments for the week starting the 23rd already wouldn’t have been generated. They therefore will not be in the system and that week will not be charged. By adding a whole service on the 23rd. Pause payment, you are still able to override for individual families by generating a one-time payment in your system. So, if there are individual families that you still need to charge, you can pause the whole service and then navigate into financial scheduled payments and select on generate one-time payment. Select the week in which you would like this to run. So, if I’d like this to run for the 23rd, I’ve negotiated with the family, they have a payment plan, we still would like to take that money out on that week. Select the 23rd, you can type your family name in here or just scroll through and select them. As this is a one-time payment, it does come out as a fixed amount, so, you just need to place the monetary amount that you’ll be taking through this payment, and then select the day that this payment should be taken. Once ready, press on save, and obviously that family does need to have payments in the system. This is our demo site, so, we don’t have payments affixed to all of our demo accounts. But if they do have their payment details saved in the system, then they will be added in as a one-time payment. You’ll be able to go into Financial Scheduled Payments, and in your calendar, you can actually move forward to that week. And because you’ve generated that one-time payment, it will actually be sitting in here ready, so, you’ll be able to visually see it. So, you can absolutely add one-time payments for particular families who are still on payment plans.

[00:21:23] 
Alternately, if you would like to pause just a couple of individual family accounts and still have the rest automatically generate, and when I say automatically generate, they are only charging families what they owe. So, if they don’t owe any money, they won’t have a scheduled payment come out unless you have a fixed amount, or a payment plan set up on their account. But for individual families, if you would like to pause their payments, just navigating to profiles, parents and guardians, make sure in the dropdown that you are looking at primary carers exclusively because they are the ones that are the bill payers and therefore have the banking information against their name. They have the schedule payment set up. Go into the account, select the middle tab being schedule payment settings. And then if we scroll to the bottom, you’re able to pause payments. It’s the exact same setup as the whole service pause payments that we just went through. So, just inputting the date range being the Monday and then the end date being the Sunday, and you’ll be able to see their payment pause history log at the bottom here.

[00:22:32] 
Alternately, if you have families who you would like to place on a payment plan, coming into this same section, under create payment plan here, you’ll be able to input those, that information. So, in their frequency, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly payments, payment day is Monday through Friday. You can start this in any week in the future. So, if you’d like this payment plan to start from next week, you’ll select Monday of next week. Alternately, if you would like this to start on the week of the 23rd, you can hit December 23rd. By placing a limit, it means that you will know automatically not take any more than the limit amount that you’ve placed on the system, so, it’s going to take up to this limit amount. Alternately for a payment plan though, you may be putting in a fixed amount. So, you may have a conversation with the family and place them on a payment plan of $250 per week. Based on the calculations, they’ll pay off their debt four to six weeks or whatever it might have been that you’ve agreed with them to. So, you can place that in the system, press on save. Now because this is upcoming, we’ve selected this to start on the 23rd of December, they will still have their existing payment plan working, which is weekly, on a Friday up until this week and then this new one will override. We’ll see the active one move to inactive and the upcoming will move into the active. So, a really great way to still be capturing family’s payments over this closure period. And really great if you do have families that owe money to put that fixed amount in because that’s all that you will take. You won’t take anything higher or less than that. So, you can guarantee when you come back from that holiday closure, you’ve still been taking that money.

[00:24:23] 
Excellent. All right. At the start of the year, a lot of services will also, embed a fee change, whether that is a fee update or whether you archive your 2024 fees and you create a new set of 2025 fees. A lot of services will look at this. So, when we’re talking about fees, you’ll be able to find that feature through settings, service settings, and then the fees tab here. This will list all of the fees that you have currently at the service. If you are looking to archive fees, you absolutely can do that by selecting on your fee here down the bottom, archive. And then you’ll place the effective from when date. So, if this is a 2024 fee and you do have this affixed in Master Roll 2 sessions up until the 31st of December you might place an archiving on this one from say the 5th of January. So, we could archive it from the 5th of January, being the end of that week that we’re utilising it with. When you do select on archive, it will come up letting you know the fee has been successfully archived, only if there are no sessions attached from the date that we’ve selected. So, I selected to archive from January 5th, which means from January 5th into the future, this fee is not attached to a child’s bookings. If it comes up with an error, it will let you know that it’s still attached to sessions which populate on Master Roll. You will be able to go through and pull your attendance reports. It will let you know what fees are attached to the attendances for children. Because it opens up in a CSV, you can use some coding to find this particular fee name, and it will let you know which sessions still have this fee attached. You’ll then need to go to Master Roll and just update those sessions to be the 2025. And then come back through and do this again and you’ll be able to archive. You can’t archive a fee that has future sessions against it, because then you won’t be charging those children. So, that’s a workaround if you are looking to archive your fees.

[00:26:43] 
If you aren’t looking to archive your fees but instead adjust them because you will be increasing by however much for the new year, you’ll then be able to utilise our fee adjustments feature. So, selecting on fee adjustments, under add fee adjustment in the dropdown, you’ll just need to go through and find the fee that we’re adding an increase or a decrease to. You can apply this to multiple fees at once, so, if you are increasing all fees by say $5, you can go through and select all fees quite quickly, and then deselect the few that you’re not wanting to attach, or go through and just click on the fees that you want to add into this section. In here, we need to select if we’re increasing or decreasing. So, for the example that I’m using, I am going to increase my fees and they’re going to increase by $5. So, putting the monetary amount in here of $5. We need to put the effective date in, so, when does this come into effect from? I am going to increase my fees from January 20th. And then once ready, you hit apply. Okay, and then we can see down under our fee adjustments list, here are all the fees that I have adjusted. I have increased by $5, and this will take place from the 20th of January 2025. It does let you know as well that this has been processed. So, automatically all of the fees from the 20th of January 2025 on Master Roll have been updated in the system. So, they will now charge that $5 additional for the session and then moving forward that session will populate as $5 more. So, really easy to update your fees as well. It works exactly the same if you do choose to decrease them.

[00:28:42] 
Excellent. Some other things to consider will be that you may need to update your children’s rooms. So, this is against their profile. So, coming into profiles, children, in the system here, each child will be assigned a room. So, when we look at a child profile here, their room is listed under room name here. This does not determine their Master Roll booking, so, when you are selecting their sessions, they can be booked into any room, but this is their main room. So, under their profile, when we’re selecting the room, this is the main room that child should populate in. So, we do need to update those coming into the new year for children who are transitioning to a new room. You can do that in bulk if your rooms move in bulk. Under filter, I can select the current room for a child. So, I might look at my caterpillar’s room and apply. That will segment my view to just be seeing those caterpillar’s children. I can quickly tick on all of those children now, press on update and I want to update their room, and in the dropdown, I can select what room they’re moving to. So, my caterpillars might be transitioning to the Butterflies room. So, I’m going to select on Butterflies and update and those children have now moved into the Butterflies room. So, when I filter by room in Butterflies, those children are now included in that list. So, it is an instant move. This might be something that you do come January 2nd once you’re back at work. You could do it now if you wanted to ahead of the new year. But definitely key to be updating those rooms. So, transitioning those children to what room they currently are in. Easy.

[00:30:36] 
The final piece in here is that you might have some children who need to end care at your service. So, for those children who are ending care and won’t be returning either after the holiday period or ending at the end of the vacation care period ahead of when the new school year starts. For those children you just need to navigate into their profile. Scroll down under their enrolment details. You want to set their final date in here. So, the first thing that I want to do is I want to set when Bap is actually finishing, and his final day is going to be the Wednesday the 22nd of January. So, selecting that date there, hitting save, and then in the system that has updated. Now, if Bap has any bookings on Master Roll, it is going to let me know and get me to confirm that firstly we are ending the enrolment. So, we’re moving the enrolment end date to be here. And based on that, there is 195 sessions that will be deleted. So, if we’re happy with that, we’re going to select OK. Okay, and now the sessions for Bap have been deleted off the system, so, they will no longer be charged. Their final session will be the 22nd of January 2025. The next step to this is, I want to extend Bap’s end date. I want their profile to stay active when the CCS automatically sends through. So, you want to extend their actual inactive date. We want them to be active at least until Sunday the 26th being the same week that they end, but potentially you might want to keep them active until the 2nd of February. Now that is a week and a half after they have ended care at your service. And there are a couple of reasons why you would extend the child’s profile to remain active over this period of time. First thing is they need to be active in order for their CCS, their final CCS to be sent through. So, Bap’s ending midweek being Wednesday but we want their CCS to be sent through and that gets sent through on the Friday night and the payment is received on the Sunday night. So, we want them to be active. We want to see them on our reports. We want to make sure that money assigns properly. So, we want to keep them active for that. The reason why you might extend that and that inactive date out an additional week is based on your internal processes. So, you want to be checking the CCS submissions to make sure that no errors came back for Bap. Firstly, if they weren’t signed out for their final day of care, if they had a before and after school care session, but the before school care session, they didn’t sign out. So, then they’ve run an error. So, you want to keep them active So, that you can action all of this. quite easily. And you might not be actioning this until the CCS is returned, which is midday Monday, but your process might be to check this on Tuesday and resend it. So, you want to give yourself a window of seven days to be able to action this and make sure that it’s returned properly. You might also, want to be keeping them active because potentially their final payment might need to come out the week after they finish or the day after they finish. So, for children, we need them to be active in order to receive that payment and successfully place everything on their account and mitigate the risk of there being any errors in the background. Again, keeping them active to ensure that all of that goes through. It’s really key to note that you have deleted all of their Master Roll bookings from the actual date that they are finishing. So, they’re no longer going to have any charges placed on their account. It is just collecting any debt that they might have, ensuring their CCS has been successfully submitted and received in order for you to close off their account properly.

[00:34:34] 
Now other things to consider are that if they do move to inactive when you come into childcare subsidy government enrolments they will no longer populate in your active list. So, if you have let them go or move to inactive you just need to select on all. Type the child’s name in and you do need to end their government enrolment in here as well. And you don’t want to end that until obviously, you know that CCS has successfully been paid in your system. So, really advantageous to keep them active for an additional 7 days after they finish at your service to mitigate all of these things that the CCS errors to make sure that you have time to troubleshoot and successfully close up their account. But if you do move them to inactive, just coming into all, you’ll be able to see their data in here. They do need to be active in order for you to shut down their government or end their government enrolment in the system. So, some things to consider.

[00:35:33] 
If you do want further information on ending child’s care at your service, we do have an incredible knowledge base article that will take you through all of the steps to make sure that you have successfully ended their care at the service, that you’ve communicated everything effectively, that their CCS has been paid, that you’ve done everything. So, please jump over and check that knowledge base article out.

[00:35:56] 
Outside of that, I do apologise. We have gone over in the session, but I hope this has been really informative. There are no questions that have been placed in the system, so, hopefully we have answered everything for you. If there is a question that pops up, please feel free to jump into our Ask an Expert hour. We run those four times per week, and we will have that link attached to the follow up email that you will receive, including the webinar recording that you’ve gone through today. You’ll get that tomorrow. As always, we’re here to help. Outside of that, thank you all So, much for your time today. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing you in a future webinar.

[00:36:40] 
Thanks So, much. Bye.