Mobile app 1.3.0: the school calendar for families, and staff notifications that find you

Version 1.3.0 is out on Google Play. It is a calendar release: the school's calendar now reaches the families it is about, and the parts of it that were only ever on the web have come to the phone. Two of the fixes in it are the kind that stopped a job being done at all.

The iPhone and iPad app is coming soon.

The school calendar, for parents and pupils

Families can now see the school's calendar: term dates, holidays and closures, and the events the school has chosen to show them. A pupil reaches it from More; a parent gets a Calendar tab on each child, which is also how the right school is named for a parent whose children attend more than one.

There is no month grid, matching the staff screen. Seven columns of event chips do not survive a phone's width, and what a family wants from a calendar is a list of what is coming. Nothing is worked out on the device: the days, the week numbers and today itself all come from the school's own calendar, so a family and the office are never looking at two different answers.

A school keeps its internal events to itself. Each event carries a "Show to parents and students" switch, on by default, and an event's private notes are never shown to a family whatever they say. A closure has no such switch: whether the school is open is not something it can decline to tell the people it is shut to.

Cancel an event, and tell families why

An event can now be cancelled rather than deleted. It stays on every calendar, struck through and labelled, with the reason beside it. A family who read "Sports Day, Saturday" and then finds it simply gone will turn up anyway.

Families are notified by default, which is the opposite of how most notices here work and is deliberate: a cancellation is the one fact about an event they most need. Restoring one notifies nobody, and the app says so. Deleting is still there, for a mistake rather than a cancellation.

Events can also repeat, weekly, monthly or annually, with their own end date. A month that has no such day is skipped rather than shifted, and an event may not run longer than its own interval.

Term dates, and a day the school was shut

Term dates can now be set from the phone, from Academic Setup, where each row shows its dates or reads "Not dated". The calendar's own empty state used to instruct the reader to date a term, from a screen that offered nowhere to do it, to a school that may be setting up on a phone precisely because it has no desk.

The daily attendance board now names the closure covering its date. Without it, a day the school had recorded itself shut listed every class as an unmarked register, and the marking screen then refused each one with no explanation of what was in the way.

The calendar's writes are three separate permissions now: periods and dates, closures, and events. Reading the calendar needs no permission at all. When term ends and which days are shut is not a privilege.

Staff notifications reach the phone

Six things staff previously had to go and look for now arrive as a notification, addressed by what someone's role actually permits rather than by their job title: a fee payment recorded, whether typed in or paid online; a payment waiting to be checked, where the school runs payment review; a candidate registering for an entrance exam; a finished import; a finished report card batch; and a subscription about to lapse. Tapping one opens the screen it is about.

Whoever recorded a payment is left out of the notice about it, including the one saying it needs verifying. On a school running review, that person is precisely the one who must not be the one to check it. A bulk payments import sends one notice for the whole file rather than one per row.

Every world currency

The currency picker on the invoice form and on bank accounts now offers all 162 active currencies with their names, searchable, so a bursar looking for the Ghanaian cedi types "ghana" rather than "GHS". The symbols are the ones people actually write, so an Australian, Canadian or Singapore dollar is no longer rendered as a bare dollar sign.

Fixes

• A fee discount could not be applied from the phone. The form was correct; the sheet holding it was not. Anything taller than the space left over was simply clipped, putting the fee type chips, the description and the Create button below the bottom edge with no way to reach them. Nothing appeared to be wrong: the screen looked finished and could not be completed. Ten bottom sheets were in the same state and all of them now scroll.
• Siblings were billed identical fee lines. Raising invoices for a parent's children took one set of lines and sent it to every ticked child, so a Year 2 and a Year 10 sibling were charged the same thing. Every selected child now carries its own editor, unticking keeps what was typed, and a validation error names the child it belongs to. An invoice cannot be edited after it is raised, which is what made this worth fixing before anything else.
• The Fees menu offered Discounts to staff whose role cannot view them, so the screen could only ever answer "not allowed", and awarding a discount at a school with an empty catalogue showed an empty picker rather than saying what was missing and where to create it.
• A session's holidays and events are now built a month at a time rather than all at once on the first frame and again on every chip tap.
• A closure falling in the break between two terms belonged to neither and appeared on no list. A term now reaches to the day before the next one opens.