You can imagine how I felt when I heard that.

It was music to my ears!

I had just asked Edna how she liked using SchoolTRAX

I had to hear more.

Edna went on to explain…

“I love it because all the Student information is at my fingertips. I don’t have to hunt around anymore,
looking like I don’t know what I’m doing”

“If someone comes to me with a question about a student’s information, I can answer just about any question they can come up with. In the sensitive area of money owed to the school, I can tell them exactly how much they owe and what items the balance is made up of. If they want a copy of their statement, I can run them one right on the spot. It sure cuts down on a lot of discussion and confusion.”

“I’m in control and it just feels great! It’s very satisfying”
“I can finally do the kind of job I’ve always wanted to do.”

WOW!

When I heard that, I knew SchoolTRAX was tracking the stuff Edna needed to track to do her job.

But the school had tools before SchoolTRAX, so I had to find out more.

“Yes, we do have a good accounting system and have had it for a number of years, but it doesn’t have the student information in it that I need. If I was to keep track of my students in the accounting system I would have to set each one up as a client in order to charge them for a course or a book. Then when I wanted to pay them something, like their caution fee, I would need to set them up as a supplier so I can pay them. It’s all very time consuming and doesn’t do what I need it to do.”

She went on to explain…

“SchoolTRAX looks after all these different aspects of our relationship with students in one easy to use system. We don’t have to shoehorn our needs into an application that was made for a different purpose.”

“I can add and drop courses, and the fees are added and dropped automatically. I can create fees for anything I need and link them to courses if I have to. I have refund scenarios which recalculate the fees for me when a student drops a course so I don’t have to figure out what the new fee should be. I can add payments to an account. If the student overpays because of a dropped course I can give them a refund cheque on the spot. We can control our textbooks and charge for ones that aren’t returned. I can help the teachers with lists of students who have paid for things like a yearbook and our coordinator teachers just love the way we can look after things like player fees for them. We just haven’t found anything that we can’t handle with SchoolTRAX.”

“But,” I asked, “even with SchoolTRAX, you still need your accounting system to look after the accounting, so how do you reconcile the student activity with your accounting system?”

Edna went on to explain…
“That’s one of the great things about SchoolTRAX. We can manage the student activity in SchoolTRAX without worrying about the financial distributions. We have our account numbers in SchoolTRAX, all linked to the charges that a student can have. Then, we simply print SchoolTRAX Posting reports on a periodic basis to give us a detail listing of our activity and a summary distribution that we input into our accounting system. Then, both systems are in sync and we are up-to-date.

It’s that easy!”

• Edna has a system tailored to her needs.
• She is in control.
• She has answers at her fingertips.
• She can be fiscally responsible.
• EDNA CAN DO A GREAT JOB!
  

In my experience, Edna and the people like her who are working in schools are hard working people who take pride in doing a good job. They love kids and the school environment and try to serve the students and the administration the best way they can. But when money is tight, like it is now, the needs of these people can be overlooked.

It’s hard to do a good job when you don’t have the tools.

Does your school have responsible, hard working people looking after student information who can’t do the best job possible because they don't have the tools? Is their job satisfaction suffering because they can’t provide immediate answers to questions posed to them, making them
wonder if they look like they don’t know what they're doing?

Get a copy of SchoolTRAX. Email for our pricing for your school.

And remember, for one year from your date of purchase, for whatever reason,

If your school is not 100% satisfied with SchoolTRAX,
you can return it to us for a full refund of your purchase cost.

One full Year!

So why are we making such a generous money back guarantee?

Well, SchoolTRAX has functions that impact every part of the school year. We want to be sure you’ve seen everything SchoolTRAX has to offer. And some of those things only happen once a year.

So, how does it pay for itself?

Well, for one school in which we implemented SchoolTRAX, the processing of the year-end removed any doubt about the benefits of the system. The year-end was processed in less time than they could’ve imagined. Fewer hours (including overtime in the past) were spent completing the job. The statements and refund cheques were ready before they had to be, so they could go into the same envelope as the report cards, saving a separate mailing for the refunds. And everyone was off for summer vacation with the year wrapped up in record time.

So what were some of the Benefits?

When they looked at how the processing had gone, they could see that the school had realized a number of benefits that translate into real money.

• The amount of hours spent to wrap up the year was reduced (no overtime was necessary since the work was done by the end of the school year, during normal school hours).
• A second mailing for the refunds was avoided by including the cheque and statement with the report card. This saved supplies, postage and the many hours to prepare a second mailing.
• The administrative staff was able to leave for the summer knowing the year was complete.
  
  

These benefits alone can translate into enough real dollars to pay for the system, but it doesn’t even begin to quantify the benefits that the office staff felt to know they had done a great job and the year was done, wrapped up, complete.

But the day to day processing results in addition hard dollar justification for the system. Some of the day to day areas of benefit include:

• Student accounts are up to date and complete. You know the account balances and you can justify every charge. This has enabled schools using SchoolTRAX to be fiscally responsible, providing accurate, upto date information to the student, parents and staff.
• The accuracy of the information in SchoolTRAX eliminates any question of whether a charge or payment is valid, saving time and reducing cost.No longer do you assume a cost because you can't prove otherwise.
• This has enabled schools using SchoolTRAX to increase their revenue because they don't have uncollected fees. Additionally, the professional presentation of the student statements results in more prompt payments.
• The accuracy of the book tracking and the consequential charge for non-return has dramatically reduced the number and cost of lost books.
• The flexibility of SchoolTRAX has facilitated the off-loading of the academic staff for any money handling that was necessary before SchoolTRAX. This frees up time for the academic staff and puts the money management into the hands of your financial staff.
• For schools with a central database of course/request information, the automated data download, data reload, and second semester download, can save hours of entry to keep the systems synchronized.

And then there is the really big one. Once SchoolTRAX has been used for a while, we hear the users of SchoolTRAX say

"I don't know how I would function without it".

So that’s why our money-back guarantee is for a year.

If you don’t have SchoolTRAX to help you through each critical part of the school year, you wouldn’t see all the money saving benefits for your school throughout the year. We want you to be seeing so much improvement in your processing that you wonder what you did before you implemented SchoolTRAX.

So you can use SchoolTRAX for a FULL YEAR before making up your mind for sure.

Then, if after a full year, you want to return SchoolTRAX, we will give you a 100% refund. No questions asked.

We want you to try SchoolTRAX, risk free.

Start the process today by sending the email with our no obligation order form, showing your school information as outlined on the form. We will get back to you with specific pricing for your school.

So, how much does it cost?

Our pricing structure is based on the size of your school (different price levels) and currently includes all the function built into SchoolTRAX. The cost per student is about the same as a locker and lock fee. This low cost makes the savings for just the year-end processing improvements alone that we detailed above pretty well pay for the initial cost of SchoolTRAX. Then, after the first year, your school is making money, and you benefit every day from your staff being more satisfied with their work. And there are all the other uses for SchoolTRAX that we haven't even talked about yet.

So, Why should you order now?

Well, we've only talked about Edna's experience with SchoolTRAX. SchoolTRAX has a world of features and can provide real money savings to your school. The sooner you have it, the sooner you can benefit from using SchoolTRAX.

If you are familiar with the work that goes on in a school, the periods of chaos and the processing workloads, then you can relate to the issues that we’ve covered already (we will get into more features and benefits later). If that is the case, you’ve probably already sent in the no-obligation order form requesting a price for your school and relief for your office staff.

Another aspect to consider is that the sooner you get the system, the sooner it can be helping your school with the day-to-day work and through those peak periods. There are a number of peak processing times that you can be prepared for if you have SchoolTRAX installed.

• Year beginning – this is a hectic time when students are registering, changing courses, paying school fees, and all wanting immediate response to their needs, expecting on-the-spot service. You probably know what I mean.
• Semester Change – this is another hectic time when courses are changing and fees are changing, not to mention looking after textbooks from the last semester, that haven’t been returned. Can you keep up?
• Year End – Now you have to wrap it all up. You have to get all the loose ends addressed and settle the accounts. Are the books all returned? Have the yearbook fees and grad fees been paid? Are there restrictions like you can’t attend grad if you owe money. Oh, yeah, we still have to get the refund cheques out, don’t we.
  

If you have SchoolTRAX installed, you have tools to help you address these periods, as well as the day to day routine that is so much more satisfying.

So, how can I be sure it is a quality product?

We use an approach to application development called Computer Aided Software Engineering or CASE technology. This is a streamlined, tool driven method of application generation where the developer of the application is more like an application architect than a programmer. The developer defines the application requirements at a high level in an English language which the CASE tool interprets and generates into detailed programs that you use to address your application requirements.

CASE technology helps us to be very productive and it lets us concentrate on the business problem. We can add new function to our systems in record time and pass on the savings to you.

What difference does it make that SchoolTRAX is built using CASE technology?

Well it has a number of advantages for you:

• We can produce our systems at lower cost. That provides cost savings that can be passed on to you.
• New features can be added to the system with less manpower. This means we can get enhancements to you quickly and cheaply.
• The programs are of high quality because the code is generated. This means that the programs don’t compromise processing quality that can suffer when hand coded. When it comes to having a job to do…
  
  

We recognize the value of excellent tools
We use only the best tools ourselves,
to create the best tools that we can for you.

So, getting back to the earlier question, how do you know that SchoolTRAX is a quality system that will work well in your school?

Here’s what we can tell you:

• We used the latest tools and technology to generate SchoolTRAX,
• We’ve worked closely with experienced users to define the requirements,
• We have feedback from people like Edna, whose enthusiasm tells us SchoolTRAX is a winner system,
• SchoolTRAX is economically priced and can pay for itself in a short period of time,
• And, to ensure that there is absolutely no cost risk to you, you can use SchoolTRAX for a full year to determine it’s worth. At anytime during that period, if you don’t agree you can’t live without it, you can send it back for a full refund of your purchase price.
  

The quality is high, the price is low, and the deal is risk free.

Start the process today by sending the email including our no obligation order form, giving us your school information as outlined on the form. We will get back to you with specific pricing for your school.

So now you’ve seen some of the features of SchoolTRAX
But
There are many more Incredible Features

If we haven’t yet convinced you that SchoolTRAX is an incredible product, check out some of the other incredible things that SchoolTRAX can do for you.

We’ll begin at the beginning. You may be wondering how we get information into the SchoolTRAX system.

So, how easy is it to get our data into SchoolTRAX?

Well, SchoolTRAX has a special Automated Data Migration sub-system just for this purpose. It reads input data and creates the student information for the system. The data can be in an Excel spreadsheet, in a text file or in an Access database.

The Data Migration sub-system can handle them all.

Once you’ve put data into the input files of student information, the files are processed through a step by step process (11 steps) to make sure the data all hangs together properly (for example, requests can’t reference courses that don’t exist). The system produces error reports for any problems and finally loads the SchoolTRAX files so you can be open for business as soon as school begins.

You may have the data you need in another computer system or it might be data that you key into the files. Either way, once the data is entered, processed and determined to be complete, it is loaded into the optimized SchoolTRAX files to provide a complete picture of the student information.

What data is stored for each student?

Once the data is loaded from the input files, you have the essential information to process the student accounts. At this point the data files include:

• Demographic data – you have names and addresses as well as the names of the student’s parents, so you know who to contact.
• Requests – you have the Courses that the student is taking. This shows the Subject Course and the Section of the Course being taken and now you can add and drop courses.
• Fees – Any Course Fees that are linked to the Course Sections are automatically linked to the student taking the Section. You don’t have to assign the Fees to the student. And when you add and drop courses, the course fees are also automatically added and reduced.
• Timetable – Once you’ve entered the calendar for your school, the day formats and periods are known and the timetable shows the course sections for each day that are taken by the student, for any date.
• Books – If you’ve linked your book titles to the courses, then the request data also links the book titles to the student. Now the actual book can be shown as being loaned to the student and can be tracked so that it is returned at the end of the semester. If it is not returned, a lost book fee can be charged to the student to appear on their statement, complete with the book serial number. And you don’t have to key the book information…
  You can barcode and scan the books!
  If you attach a bar code scanner, you can track the book information using your scanner rather than keying the serial number in.

But that’s only the beginning!

Once you get using SchoolTRAX, you’ll want other information in the system. For instance:

How can I charge for things like a Yearbook?

There’s more to Fees than Course fees. Fees can be defined for anything you want to charge for. For things you rent, or that you want a deposit on, like caution fees which are refunded at the end of the year. You can rent anything from locks to student housing.

How do I keep track of payments?

When the student makes a payment, you simply enter it into the payments function. Then the Balance is calculated and shows up on the student information and statement so you always know how exactly how much is owed by all the students and by each individual student. And you can print a receipt if the student wants one.

How can I keep track of a student’s medical issue?

The Notes function lets you keep track of all sorts of different things about your students. Notes have a security feature so only the people you specify in the security sub-system (another great feature) are allowed to see the note. You can keep track of medical issues, behavior and discipline issues, anything that you determine is necessary to track. And they can appear on group reports to provide necessary information. If a note is of particular importance, it can be defined as an important note and then when it is added to a student, the notes tab shows an eye catching red exclamation mark (check out the panels tour to see an example). It could be a health alert, a custody issue, or a particular situation about the parents that requires sensitivity in handling. It just makes it easier for you to do the best job that you can.

What if we have a pre-determined list of conditions that can apply to a student?

Topics let you expand the information you store about a student. Topics can be pre-defined things that you select or they can be entry fields where you enter whatever description you want. Between Notes and Topics, you can track just about anything that you can imagine about a student. Again, topics can be defined as of high importance with the same eye catcher as we described for Notes, with the same advantages for your school in handling your students and their situations.

Can we have a student photo and can it appear on reports?

Student Photos can be loaded into SchoolTRAX. Then they can appear in the student information as well as on a variety of group reports. Then you can give your chaperones a list of students including their pictures (and other notes information if appropriate, like medAlerts). SchoolTRAX can load photos which are stored as bitmaps in an Access file like Jostens prepares or where each photo is an individually stored file as is prepared by The Icon Experience.

We have lots of things we need to keep track of.
Do you have a way to keep track of our inventories of items?

The Allocation function is where you keep track of school property that is loaned or rented to each student, like musical instruments, for instance. You can define the different inventories of items that you have in your school. Then you can identify each unique item in the inventory and track the inventory as you allocate specific items to your students. You can charge a rental fee, but more importantly you have a control system that tracks your school property and records who has each item so you can make sure the items are returned.

I want to know which students are in each family.
(and I want to charge the family a maximum fee amount)

With the Groups function you can define groups of students that are not defined by time. This is where you can link students together into a family. You can display reports which show their pictures. This group function is handy if the fees for a family can’t exceed a maximum. (See our report samples for an example of controlling fees for a group).

I want to know who the players are on each of our sports teams.

The Year Groups are groups that are defined by time, like for the school year. For instance, this is where you would link together the students who form the student council for this year, or the roster for a sports team, again with reporting capability complete with pictures.

We have correspondence to and from students and parents. I don’t have time to file it but I need immediate access to the documents to answer questions.

The Documents section is where we keep all correspondence produced and sent to a student. In addition, SchoolTRAX includes the really great feature of keeping track of the correspondence you get about a student. All you need is a scanner and you can scan letters into SchoolTRAX and link them to the student. You can give them a description which shows up in the list of documents so you can find and view them whenever you need to. You end up with a complete record of documents to and from the student in one easy to access interface. No more digging through paper files to find that letter the student’s mother sent in. This is a feature that will really save you time and aggravation. Speaking of job satisfaction…..

Our courses are made up of modules. Can you handle that?

Any course section can be defined to have modules. A section can consist of a number of modules and each module can be a percentage of the course or can consist of a specified number of days. Then when a module is added to a student with a request, the start and end dates for the modules are calculated using the school calendar and you know exactly when a student should be completing one module and starting another. You can determine exactly if the student is on schedule or not. Modules were originally added to SchoolTRAX to accommodate the requirements of Outreach schools and provide a highly flexible delivery of education to students.

We are a private school. Can SchoolTRAX give us
some idea of what funding we can expect from the Government?

Private School Funding is a new feature that we are currently in the process of developing to help private schools get a better handle on what resources they have to work with. What we are trying to do with this feature is to record any special characteristics of a student which affects the funding for the school. So if a student has special needs that the school is paid to provide, this is captured. Once all of these unique aspects are defined, we have rate tables which can be filled in so the funding that the school is entitled to, can be calculated. Also, when the funding for a category has levels, we want to identify the areas where the school is close to an increment (the next higher funding level) so that the school has an opportunity to manage the category. All in the interests of maximizing the resources the school has to work with.

Can you show us what courses the student asked to take coming into this year?

The Registration last year function shows a record of the courses and sections that the student asked for coming into this year.

Can you show us what courses the student has requested for next year?

The Registration for this year is a record of the courses and sections that the student has asked for, for the coming year. We plan to use this course information as input to a new student scheduling function to identify the courses wanted by the students.

We have interviews with our students. Can we
schedule the interview with the teacher and keep
track of what was discussed?

The interview function works as a diary for teachers to schedule and keep track of interview appointments with students. The function provides an “outlook” like calendar record of appointments in the future and in the past. It shows the appointments by date for one or all teachers in the school. The interview can be seen from the teacher interface to help the teacher plan, and from the student, connected to their course. Each interview is stored separately and includes space to record what was discussed and resolved.

We define Individualized Program Plans for our students. Is there some way we can keep track of them with SchoolTRAX?

The IPP Checklist defines the Individualized Program Plan (IPP) for a student. The Program Plan components for your school can be defined in SchoolTRAX and those that apply to this student can be selected to show up here.

Can we keep track of attendance with SchoolTRAX?

The Attendance function provides an update function as well as keeping a record of the student attendance, by date, by course/section, by student, by teacher and by homeroom. The entry is on an exception basis where the lates and absences are entered.

Each of these areas provides far more than what we can describe in the few words we’ve invested here to describe them. You can get an idea of how they look for one student in the On-Line Tour/Panels. Also check out the On-Line Tour/Reports. These give a bit of an idea of the system, but even with these we’ve only shown a bit of what SchoolTRAX contains.

SchoolTRAX Flexibility

What we’ve built into SchoolTRAX is flexibility. Wherever possible we’ve tried to put you in control of what is stored and whenever there is optional information, we’ve tried to let you define the variables. This puts you in control and helps SchoolTRAX solve your unique application requirements.

One of the interesting results of this flexibility is the ways that SchoolTRAX has been used in different situations. I love it every time I to hear of unplanned ways SchoolTRAX has been used by a school to do something that we hadn’t even thought of. Solving problems in ingenious ways, using the flexibility of SchoolTRAX, just adds to the value of SchoolTRAX for your school.

And so far we’ve just talked about student information.

SchoolTRAX has much, much more!

Here’s a list of some of the other parts of the system.

• School Information, including school topics and school funding parameters.
• Teacher information including teacher timetable and teacher appointments and appointment calendar.
• Year Beginning Function to increment the student grade.
• Year Beginning Function to bring any prior year balance owed by a student, into the current year.
• Automated Load of default fee refund scenarios based on the length of each course.
• Automated Load of mandatory fees to include things like caution fees that apply to all students.
• Automated Load of student books to link book titles to students based on the courses they are taking.
• Year End process to refund any deposits.
• Year End Refund cheque creation.
• Lost Book Fee creation based on books not returned.

SchoolTRAX includes a number of sub-systems!

These include:

• Automated Data Migration this is a topic that we described above. It provides a streamlined way of initially setting up the system.
• Funding Sub-system for Private schools. There is a whole lot of definition of the funding parts and rules. This let’s you define the funding guidelines for your school.
• Protection of Personal Privacy. Your school will most certainly have rules for what information can be provided to whom. But does everyone know what the rules are for providing information? Do you know that the privacy policy of the school is being followed? You will notice on the Student information panels that there is a privacy button. You can define what the school’s policy is for the information on each panel, then if someone is asked for student information of a particular type, the person being questioned can click on the privacy button and review the school policy on the issue to know how to proceed. You can define a color for the button so that it can indicate a degree of privacy. For instance, if a panel has particularly sensitive information on it, the button can be red to show that the information is very private. Then pressing the button brings up a description of the reasons and the policy. This function puts your staff in a position to handle the student information responsibly. This is an area of increasing importance and is a necessary part of any system built for these times and for government regulations regarding the privacy of individuals. This function is currently being developed.
• Registration. We reviewed the registration information as it applied to the student, but there is more to it. A student can be enrolled in a program which means that certain courses are pre-defined to be ones that have to be taken. These programs can be defined and then when selected for a student they are linked to the student eliminating the entry of the courses for the registration. This reduces the amount of entry required by the registration function.
• Student Photo Import– This sub-system streamlines the way student photos are brought into the system. The photos are linked to the student information to be available for viewing and to print on reports.
• Maintain System Files – This sub-system lets you change parts of the system that define how the system works or looks. An example is the cheque format. There are 4 MS Word formats distributed with the system. There is a top, centre and bottom position of the cheque and a custom layout as well. You can make changes to these templates if necessary through this system maintenance function so that the cheque matches exactly to the format of your pre-printed forms.
• Maintain Database – This subsystem contains functions that are used to control the data files. Included is a function to back up the system database. As well, there are functions to show you at any time how much computer space the system occupies. This is important as you use and safeguard your data.
• Subsequent Semester Requests Migration – When students register at the beginning of a school year they are trying to see the whole year and anticipate what they will do in a subsequent semester. When things change, the courses taken often change. These changes can be made through the request add/drop function available interactively in SchoolTRAX, however some schools who have this data in a central board system prefer to make the changes through a file download of new request information. This migration lets your school make these request changes as well as making necessary adjustments to associated course fees.
• Security – This is a very important part of SchoolTRAX and one of the areas of the system that speaks to the quality of SchoolTRAX since it isn’t easy to translate good system security into dollar benefits. Experience has shown that people will pay big bucks for a cure, but precious little for prevention. And unfortunately, from a system justification standpoint, this is one of the features of the system that falls into the prevention category. The Security sub-system lets you restrict access to the system so that only the people you want to get at some things are allowed. Everyone else gets a message that they don’t have access. It’s a function in the system that can keep you and your data out of trouble. Security is an increasingly important consideration for organizations, the only problem is, there are usually no mechanisms in place to protect the access to functions and the data. SchoolTRAX has the mechanisms. Each person accessing the system has to be identified in the security system along with their security access level. Then when they access certain functions, restrictions can disallow their use of the function. Are your current systems as secure as they should be?
  
  

So what kind of schools does SchoolTRAX work for?

We aren’t a traditional school.
Can we still use SchoolTRAX?

Let’s say that you are an Outreach school. SchoolTRAX has a number of features that should be of particular interest to your school.

• Personalized education plans – You can define the Various Program Plan components that work for your school and then pick the appropriate ones for each individual student for their personalized education plan. The individualized program plan for a student is displayed on the IPP Checklist panel tab.
• Parental Input – You want the parents involvement and you want to have them give you information that you can keep on-file. You can send them forms, have them fill them out and then you can scan them into the documents section of SchoolTRAX to be available for the instructor on the documents panel tab.
• Course Modules – You can define course sections that consist of modules. Then when you link the section to a student along with the start and end date for this student, the dates are assigned to each module for this student. As the student progresses through the module, progress is tracked against the dates. Panels show if the student is ahead or behind schedule, informing you of their progress. Another feature is the ability to designate a workbook as the indicator that a module is starting or ending. Then, when this book is scanned for this student, the module dates are updated automatically saving you the trouble of entering that information.
• Interviews– You want to have regular interaction with your students including interviews to discuss issues and progress. Interviews can be scheduled, using a calendar function similar to what you find in Microsoft Outlook. Here you schedule interview times between the student and a teacher. The interview has a formatted panel which prompts for necessary information and includes a free format section to allow the interviewer to record what was discussed. Any interview can be restricted for viewing only by the teacher who originated it. Interviews can be seen from the teacher information interface and from the student information interface. When looking at a particular course for a student, interviews that focused on that course can be seen from the course information. This provides a complete historical picture of your interaction with the student as they progress through a course of study.
  
  

Maybe you are an Independent or Private School that has to do it all. If you are an independent school that doesn’t have a school board that looks after some of the student information, you will like SchoolTRAX because it does such an excellent job of looking after the student information for you. Some independent schools are more dependent upon the student and their parents for the funding of the student’s education. Also, funds can be more critical when the school doesn’t have a School Board to appeal to for more funding. The features that we think are of particular interest to your school include:

• Fees – Here you can define any kind of fees that are appropriate for your school. These can be course related or not and can be limited, for instance, to a maximum for a family. The fees can be for the rent of an item and can be a deposit which can be refunded at a later date. Each fee has a financial account linked to it so that the revenue is credited to specific accounts in your accounting system.
• Payments– Payments can be recorded when the student makes a payment for their schooling. The payments can be any type of payment that is accepted by the school like VISA, MasterCard, cash, cheques, etc. Again each payment type is linked to an account number so the payment is put into the proper financial account. A payment type can be defined as a write-off. This lets you offset the Accounts Receivable that was created when the fees were charged and reflect the amount as a non-recoverable charge and distribute it to the appropriate financial account. If a receipt is required, one can be printed on the spot.
• Funding– This is a new feature of the system that we are developing particularly for Alberta Funded private schools, funded through Alberta Learning. The department in charge of education funding for the province has created a new funding framework that we are building into SchoolTRAX. We expect that the flexibility that we build into SchoolTRAX may be adaptable to other jurisdictions. If our structure doesn’t fit your funding framework, this is a feature that will not be any use to your school. If it looks like some additional function would make it work, get back to us with your ideas. As we said in the development section, we can make some changes pretty quickly and the only way to know for sure is to ask us to have a look.
• Documents – The documents section is very flexible part of the system. You can link any kind of document to a student. You can image and index documents that you send to the student. You can scan and index documents that you receive that apply to the student. The documents can be one page or multi-page documents, in color or black and white. The interface includes annotation so that you can highlight and put notes on correspondence to help you do a better job of providing a cost-effective education to your students.
• Allocations – Each school has a number of different inventories of items. A typical inventory of items is padlocks. Here you have the category of item being padlocks. Then each padlock has a specific combination and is loaned to a specific student for the school year. This is all tracked in the Allocations. You can see what padlocks you have, and the students who have them rented. When you look at the allocations from the student interface, you can see the specific padlock the student has and it’s combination, condition and whatever else you may want to track. The rent for the item can be charged using a fee related to this type of inventory item, i.e. padlock. The revenue from the rent of the item is distributed to the financial account defined in the fee.
• Attendance – This is a new feature that we hope to get feedback about. It has the potential for a great deal of scope. Currently it allows you to record the lates and absences for students for a specific date, for a course/section, for a teacher and for a home room.
• Books– The books for each course can be controlled in SchoolTRAX. The first task is to define the book titles for each course of study. Since the Sections are linked to the course, this links the book to each section and therefore to each student request. Now when you look at the book tab for a particular student you see all the book titles for all the courses represented by the student requests. This gives you a short list of the book titles that may be loaned to the student. Now you can link a specific book to the student. When you choose one of the book titles listed for the student, you can see a list of the actual books listed by their serial numbers. (This assumes that you’ve entered the individual book serial numbers for each book title to create your inventory of books.) Now, find a matching serial number in the inventory or you can enter the serial number of the book either by keying it or scanning it with a bar code scanner. This links the specific book to the student. We encourage the bar coding because you can then link a book to a student simply by scanning the bar code… What could be simpler? When the semester ends and the books are to be returned, a return function again lets you bar code scan each book as being returned and the link to the student is updated with the return date. Supporting reports make the whole process a very easy to manage solution to an otherwise messy problem.
  

There are a number of things that we hope to add to SchoolTRAX over the next while. These include the following:

Futures

Browser Access to SchoolTRAX– This is a future change we plan to make to SchoolTRAX to provide access to the application over the internet. The Plex development environment is just now being updated to generate .NET applications from the model. Since we only develop using the development environment, we are waiting for the new generator. The generator makes sure that the high quality code that is in the application is extended to what we need for an application that is open to users on the internet. Currently, a number of new things are being developed by Microsoft for internet processing. We want to be sure that our system provides the latest, best function and security that can be built into the system. This type of programming is best left in the hands of those few experts who understand all the requirements. This code is being built into the .NET products from Microsoft. Then these .NET products are included into the Plex development environment by Plex experts so that proper functioning applications can be generated. So with this method, you can be confident that the internet aspects of SchoolTRAX will have been built by internet experts. By waiting for these new features we will be able to offer the latest in internet processing. Confidence in the processing will come from the fact that the internet part of the application is like the error handling and messaging that is part of an application. It is included as part of the system that gets integrated into the application when the development environment knows it is an internet application. I'm sure that this approach will be comforting to you because I know it is comforting to us to know that internet experts will have built the internet part of SchoolTRAX and have included all the latest features. If you have internet access now, are you confident that it is doing all the processing it should? Will your application take advantage of all the .NET capabilities that Microsoft is currently building into their products? If new things come along that will make your application better, can you regenerate the application to include them like SchoolTRAX? SchoolTRAX is setting a new standard that will also include internet processing. Academic Achievement – This is a future function that will track the achievements of each student and show them in this function. We currently have some achievement data included with each request however we plan to make this a more full function feature.
Graduation Requirements – This is a future function that will track the requirements for a student depending upon the program that the student is enrolled in.
Student Scheduling – This is a future function that we are currently researching to identify the best approach to providing this function. It will work with each student’s registration data to come up with an efficient timetable solution for each student and for the school.

So, there you have it. I could say a lot more but you are probably getting tired of reading by now.

If you want to see some of SchoolTRAX, take in the tours that show you some of the panels and the reports.

Keep in mind that you can define a lot more things than we can show on a few panels or describe on this web site. And if you have a question about whether SchoolTRAX can handle something you have to do at your school, describe it in an email to us and we will do our best to see if we can come up with a solution for you. If it just isn’t something we can do but it looks like a good idea, who knows, we may decide to add it into SchoolTRAX.

Now, one last chance to do one of the best things for your school that I can think of…