use for a private music school. track attendance and payments

[blastedkane]

Hi

I am reading through the documentation and think that civi could be what I am looking for.

We currently use an access dB for our crm requirements that I have developed over a number of years however I started before I knew anything about normalisation and basic good practice 

We are also using joomla 3.5 as the web presence

I am now looking to rebuild a more robust crm and think that civi could do it but I have a few questions.

The current dB tracks attendance, purchases, exams and results. Students can do more than one instrument and also we can have multiple students from a single family. Lessons are paid for by monthly standing order.

Students can also purchase books, instruments and accessories. And we have up to 12 classes a day, Mon to sat over 4 instruments

Looking at the documentation I am thinking of working in the following way. Can anyone advise potential pitfalls or issues.

1. Set up a household (can this household be the joomla user as we currently use a single log in for all family members)
2. Add the parent as primary contact
3. Add the student and link them
4. Subscribe the student to the relevant membership class to record payments. (Eg keyboard \ monthly cost) attributes - monthly payment recurring.
5. Add to recurring weekly event. eg monday keyboards 1600 (How would I track the attendance)

Not all students do exams but most do. Could I set another class of events for one off single exams (instrument, exam board, grade, eventual result) / workshops.   these would have specific prices

I also need to know if civi can handle payment for predetermined products, Mailing to groups (all keyboard players, just one class, a number of individuals across classes like a word style mail merge)
, track whether monthly payments have been made and create comprehensive reports covering all of the above
 
Finally does the language override in joomla work as I would like to rename some of the labels to fit with the business specifics.

I know these are quite specific questions and I will probably figure most out by playing and am happy to invest as much time as it takes however I would like to know I am on the right track before spending hours on something that just wont work in the way I need it to

Thanks for reading

Rob

[Upperholme]

Hi Rob, and welcome to the CiviCRM community.

I'm not sure about the household having a user account, I also go with the notion that it is individuals who log in to websites. If you had a 'Head of Household' (a relationship type that already exists in a default Civi install) then that person could be your user, and they can have permission to see and edit the contact records for the other members in their household.

I'm pretty sure that a given contact can only have one live membership of a given organisation at any one time, so if you want to use membership to represent a given instrument then you might need to have each instrument set up as an organisation record and have membership of that organisation as the instrument class/programme.

Tracking attendance: if each class/session is an event then the teacher running the session can record attendance? It's just changing a participant status from 'registered' to 'attended'.

Exams can be events.

Can Civi handle payment for pre-determined products? That depends on your specific need. You can create a contribution page and present it such that form the user's perspective they are purchasing a product, but Civi won't handle stock control or anything like that.

Mailings to groups - yes. Mail merge - yes.

Tracking payments - yes.

Language override - Civi has its own in-built tool for this - word replacement.

Hope this helps.

Good luck with it.
Graham

[blastedkane]

"I'm not sure about the household having a user account, I also go with the notion that it is individuals who log in to websites. If you had a 'Head of Household' (a relationship type that already exists in a default Civi install) then that person could be your user, and they can have permission to see and edit the contact records for the other members in their household."

to clarify my position on this (I was typing the post on a tablet late last night)  we have a single point of contact for all members of a family. the majority of our students are children and as such we primarily communicate with the parent hence the head of household.  also we use a single family log in to make it easier for the family to get all of the homework for their children however when it comes to exams then not all children in the household will be eligible.

for example -

• Jane calls and asks about lessons for her daughter
• we enter her as the primary point of contact
• julie enrols in a keyboard class - she becomes a user (however we will still correspond with mum as she is under 18)
• Julie then enrols in a guitar class - she has a second class
• Steve, Julie's brother decides that he wants to do guitar however he has had lessons elswhere and so he joins an exising class and becomes a user (still under 18 and therefore we still correspond with Jane
• Exam season comes around and we want to invite Steve to do Grade 4 guitar but Julie cannot do this

In this instance we need to contact Jane about Steve but not Julie.

also each user uses the same email address, physical address and phone numbers.

Currently I export a user/student list from access to excel and run a word mail merge which works however I think that there are better ways to do this


I'm pretty sure that a given contact can only have one live membership of a given organisation at any one time, so if you want to use membership to represent a given instrument then you might need to have each instrument set up as an organisation record and have membership of that organisation as the instrument class/programme.

I think I understand however I think I need to play with the system to get a feel for it.  What I have seen in the video tutorials leads me to believe that with some workarounds this would be a great addition to our systems and is the closest thing that I have see to a CRM that fits our needs.

Finally, If i want to roll this out to other music schools how easy is it to

• package a complete website / CRM solution from joomla (I currently use akeeba for backing up a site)
• Administer once released (security updates for example)