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One of my schools has recently bought into ParentMail, but is having a few teething problems with dinners. At the moment, teachers complete a paper register that also includes sandwiches/meat option/veggie option. I know, I know, but there is no will to change this. Someone in the office then inputs this into a spreadsheet to break it down into free/sandwiches/to pay for meal with 3 meal options. The kitchen then get totals per option and at the end of the week get a total of each option and the total number of which were free. For billing purposes this is then input into ParentMail and if an account dips below X amount contact is made to inform the parent. This all seems like a lot of duplication of effort. Does anyone know if one can import information into a ParentMail register, or get it to output to csv?

I've been looking at software to help us deal with managing these clubs and the payments that come with it. We're currently with ParentMail and don't like the way they have proposed. So looking to purchase another system Tucasi seem to appear a lot when I research on this topic. Has anyone used Tucasi Extended Day module? How much does it cost? Can we purchase it standalone (without moving from ParentMail)? What's good and bad about it? Any other recommendations?

Afternoon Edugeekers, Been asked to look into some software to send student progress reports to parents via email, instead of printing a paper copy, giving to the student and that sitting in the bag for months with the parents never seeing it. We currently use ParentMail to send messages/forms etc. home, but they have no option for sending progress reports or mail-merging attachments from SIMS. My searching skills on EduGeek probably need some work, but I can't seem to find a thread about this either. Does anybody use any software like this? I appreciate there is probably a full alternative to ParentMail which has an option, but we are in a 3 year contract I believe. If there is a single piece of software for this, for the rare occasions it will be used, that would suffice. Thanks in advance. Lee.

We're having a bit of a problem with ParentMail. For most members of staff, as well as parents, it works fine. However, the user who's taken on the administration duties has a recurring issue, whereby ParentMail will grind to a halt whenever she tries to run a string of reports. The first one or two will work fine, but by the third report, ParentMail will seemingly crash. The PC itself doesn't crash, and there's nothing going on in the event viewer to suggest that the problem is local. It happens in multiple browsers across different PCs, and always seems to occur when there is an action that must be repeated for a number of different records. It really seems to me as if this is something that is happening server-side, though I'm open to suggestions about anything I can try locally. Anyone else having a similar issue? It's a shame really.. on the face of it, ParentMail appears to be a really good system. However, it seems that some shortcuts have been taken to rush it to market (particularly with regard to the UI - visually, it's nicely designed, but intuitively, it's poorly executed), and their support line has been an absolute nightmare.

Is anyone else seeing weird surnames in the list view (second column) of ParentMail? We're seeing the correct name in the main "details" box, but some odd surnames in the list to its left. For instance, the main box might say "Boris Johnson" while the list has him as "ByeBye, Boris". (I wish).

Hi.. We're a small educational charity who need to communicate with 200 parents on a weekly basis. We need to be able to group parents together so we can send out group messages as well as individual messages. We also need to be able to schedule messages to be sent at certain times. Currently we use Text Magic, however we are now sending 40-50k texts a year and it's costing close to £2k. We also have some parents asking for email communication instead of texts. Can anyone recommend something similar to Text Magic which also has email functionality and will be more cost effective? or an email alternative without the texting. We're based in the UK. I know about ParentMail but I think it might be too expensive for us. Thanks!

Schools just about to fork out for ParentMail. The following bits I think: Payment management and collection module Dinner Money Manager or integration with your cashless system Online payment facility and a mobile app for parents Anything IT wise I need to look into? I'm assuming this is all Cloud based. Anyone using them? Are they ok? No horror stories to be concerned about? Comments or alternatives? It's a small Primary School. Thanks