ParentMail Issues

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

I was wondering if any other ParentMail schools are facing issues at the moment?

 

They appear to have updated the parent app, without any communication to Schools or parents, and the new app is causing many parents to have difficulty in singing in and topping up dinner money. Also iOS users are having trouble updating the app - they open the app and it says an update is needed, but the update button does nothing and ParentMail's advice is to manually update via the app store / re-install the app. We're getting calls every day from parents about this and have had to put together some instructions ourselves to get out of the update loop. We've had no comms from ParentMail about this other than when we have raised the issue with them in a support ticket.

 

Additionally, absence reporting has changed so that parents can now notify us of future absences. Again, no communication to schools or parents that this was happening. Initially, the future absence date was the one reported in the admin backend, meaning it was impossible to tell when a parent submitted the absence. After some pestering, they eventually put through a fix so that both the absence date and request date and time are shown, but now the absence list is sorted by reverse absence date - so future absences are always on page 1. Consequently, todays absences are often on page 2 or 3 and will be further back still once future absences build up. I've reported this to ParentMail but they cannot see beyond their own mindset and are saying this is intended design and just to search through the pages to find the unread ones!! I've tried to explain that in a School office, once a future absence is reported, we will record in our MIS and mark it as dealt with. We don't then need to see it at the top of the list every day in ParentMail - what we need to see is NEW absences for today - but again, their stubborn answer is that this is how it should be, if you want it different raise a feature request, but it won't be treated with priority as developers are busy with the new version.

 

Every time we report an issue to support we have to go through the AI response first which is really frustrating.

 

And they are now advertising a new version of ParentMail coming soon (again, no comms about this prior) - great if the new version brings improvements but the issues we've had above are leaving us feeling a bit concerned about this.

 

Are other ParentMail customers feeling the same frustrations?