Autumn updates

We've made a flurry of small improvements to Libacura over the last few days...

• You can now get a PDF version of the Booking details screen, for printing or emailing. Select the booking you want, and click on the new "Printable report" button.

• There's a new report listing the allergies of your registered children. Might be handy to print it out and stick it up in your club kitchen (if you're happy about confidentiality implications).

• You can now enter free text into the Tetanus date field of the child information screens. This could be good if (as is often the case) parents are not sure of an exact date, but can give you a rough indication such as "Summer 2005".

• When entering payment or fee records, you can save a few keystrokes by omitting the year, and Libacura will automatically assume the current year.

Alternative sign-out sheet layout now available

If you would prefer to print the daily sign-out sheets (registers/attendance lists/sign-in sheets) for a club session in portrait rather than landscape, you can now do so. Simply log in, go to Settings, select the Organization tab, then towards the bottom of that screen is a new selection box where you can choose the Sign-out template you prefer. Currently there are two options -- the original landscape format, and a new portrait format. Note, in order to fit on to a portrait page, some columns are not displayed in the portrait template.

As always, if you have suggestions for enhancements or variations on the existing templates, please do let us know via the support email address.

Check your staffing ratios more easily

It can be tricky to check your staffing ratios, but we've added a new report to make it simpler. Select a club period, for example from the Clubs index screen, and then click on "Bookings by age group" to see the new report. For each club session (date), the report shows the number of 0-3 year-olds, 4-7 year-olds and eights and overs booked, as well as the total number of children.

Smarter statements for printing/emailing

Behind the scenes, we've changed the way we generate PDF statements, for printing or emailing. The new statements are (we think!) smarter and may take up a little less paper. They also now include "fold marks" to make it easier for you to accurately fold the pages in three for DL envelopes, if desired.

As before, the statements are designed for standard windowed DL envelopes: If you post statements to your members you could save time writing out addresses or preparing address labels by using windowed envelopes.

This change puts us in a better position to support customizations to the statements, which some members have requested recently. We're working towards enabling customization of the text, and a facility to include your logo at the top of each statement, and support for printing statement runs double-sided. If you have suggestions, requirements or comments, let us know!

No more accidental duplicates when registering families

When you go to register a new family, you will now get a list of any existing registered families with the same or similar surnames. This should help prevent duplicate family records being created accidentally.

A new report, and some tips on using reports

There's a new report available now, showing the information from the Collection tab for each registered child; that is, the names of people who may or may not collect the children. You can find it on the Reports screen, or from the index of children.

As with all reports in Libacura, you can:

• sort the columns by clicking on the column headings,


• print the report using your web browser's print function (File->Print...), and


• export the report to a CSV file using the "Export" button at the top of the report.

The exported file can easily be loaded into a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel or StarOffice Calc. You may find that printing from a spreadsheet gives you more control over the appearance of the printed document.

Small change to "Welcome" emails

We've made a very small change relating to the "Welcome" emails that you can send to parents to enable them to access their Libacura accounts. From today, those emails come from your organization's support email address, not from Libacura's admin email address. This has the distinct advantage that if the email "bounces" or can't be delivered for any reason outside Libacura's control (such as the parent's email address being invalid), you will now see the failure message, so you can chase up the problem (e.g. fix the email address) and re-send.



As a consequence of this, you'll have to set a suitable support email address for your organization, if you haven't already. Simply go to the Settings screen, select the Organization tab, and enter your organization's email address.

Tracking permissions

Libacura keeps track of whether parents have given certain permissions, such as permission to administer first aid to the child in your care, apply plasters, or take photos for publicity.

Would you like to track additional permissions?



Just let us know what additional permissions you would like us to track, by sending an email to support at libacura.co.uk, and we can easily add the necessary permissions to your organization. Equally, if you don't need any of the standard permissions, let us know and we can drop them from your organization.

In future we'll be adding a settings screen to enable you to add or remove permissions yourself.

New features: pre-completed printable registration forms, store primary carer information, and more...

Over the weekend a few new features have been rolled out in Libacura, and you'll notice some minor improvements to the layout of the screens:

Separate account and family screens

The account screen was getting rather full of tabs, and we ran out of space... So we've split it into two: a screen for account information and a screen for family information. All the familiar tabs are still there, just slightly re-organized. You can easily switch between the two sections using new buttons. As part of this change, you'll notice a strange-looking entry on the Changes screen: "Unknown user created accounts for ..."; please don't be alarmed -- it's nothing to worry about!

Navigate quickly between family or account records

A couple of new buttons at the top of each family and account screen make it much quicker to move from one family or account to the next or previous without having to return to the top-level index of accounts.

Store names and addresses of "primary carers"

A number of organisations have asked us for this feature, to support an OFSTED requirement that childcare organisations must keep a record of names and addresses of all "primary carers" associated with children in their care. Now Libacura makes this easy, with a new screen for entering and maintaining the information. You can find the new "Primary carers" tab in the Family screen.

Pre-filled registration forms

You can now generate printable (PDF) registration forms for registered families, with their current details filled in. So parents simply need to check the details and make corrections if necessary -- much less form filling for parents, and it should save you time when updating records, because it will be easier to see at a glance what's changed. Of course, it's better still to get parents to maintain the information on-line in Libacura themselves!

Remove old club periods

For long-time users of Libacura, you may have accumulated quite a list of old club periods. Now you can delete them when you've finished managing the bookings and fees. We recommend you delete club periods after, say, a year. A small word of warning: deleting a club period means you can no longer see the details of the bookings (which children were booked on which days), only the total charge for each booking. So don't delete a club period until all booking and payment queries have been resolved.

And a quick teaser for a new feature coming very soon... Up to now, the history of bookings and transactions for a family has grown and grown, with no convenient way to reset it or remove old historical transactions from one year to the next, for families that stay with you year on year. That's set to change -- watch this space!

We hope you like the changes. Please send comments (good or bad!) or questions by email to support@libacura.co.uk.