A parent cannot sign in

Somebody says they cannot get into the Portal, or they get in and there is nothing there. Almost every one of these is the same misunderstanding - the address a person signs in with is not the address on their contact record - and this is how to tell which case you have before you change anything.

Step 1 of 7

First, is it one person or all of them?

If several parents report it within the same hour, stop looking at their records. Nothing you can change on a contact goes wrong for everybody at once, and the cause is almost always at our end rather than in your data. Raise a ticket and say how many people and roughly when it started. One person who cannot get in is the case the rest of this walkthrough is about.

This has happened for real - a weekly password rotation that ran long took the Portal out for everybody for part of a morning. Editing records while that is going on only makes work to undo.

Use the arrow keys to move between steps.

First, is it one person or all of them? — press Escape or click to close

1. First, is it one person or all of them?

   If several parents report it within the same hour, stop looking at their records. Nothing you can change on a contact goes wrong for everybody at once, and the cause is almost always at our end rather than in your data. Raise a ticket and say how many people and roughly when it started. One person who cannot get in is the case the rest of this walkthrough is about.

   This has happened for real - a weekly password rotation that ran long took the Portal out for everybody for part of a morning. Editing records while that is going on only makes work to undo.

2. The address they sign in with is not the one on their contact

   This is the one to rule out first, because it accounts for more of these than everything else put together. The email on the contact is where you send them post. The email on the login is what they type to sign in. They are two separate things, and changing the contact never changes the sign-in. So somebody who gave you a new address last term is still signing in with the old one, and will be until somebody changes the login too. Open their contact and look at the Identity tab.

   A login showing an address that no longer matches the contact is completely normal and is still their login. Check the NAME on the login rather than the address - if the name is this person, it is theirs. To move the sign-in to the new address, use Rename Login.

3. They sign in fine, but there is nothing there

   If they get in and the page is empty - no lessons, no account, no children - then the sign-in worked and the login simply is not attached to the record you are looking at. The usual cause is a second contact record for the same person. The login sits on the empty duplicate while the real record, the one with their children and their account, carries a different login or none. Search their name and see whether more than one record comes back, including archived ones.

   Moving a login from one record to another is not something the tab offers, so this one comes to us - say which record should keep the login and which is the duplicate. It is worth tidying the duplicate at the same time, which is a job of its own.

4. They have no login at all

   The tab says so plainly when there is nothing on the Identity, and offers three ways out. Send Invite is usually the one to reach for - it emails them a link, they choose their own password, and you never handle it. Create Schooble Login makes the account there and then with a temporary password you have to pass on. Assign Existing Schooble Account is for somebody who already signs in to Paritor somewhere else.

   Where the contact has no Identity yet, Assign is not a box you type an address into - the tab looks for an account using the email already on the contact and tells you what it found. In the picture it says no Schooble account uses that address, so only two buttons are offered. Getting the contact's email right first is what makes the third one appear.

5. Never use Unassign to put an address right

   Unassign is the one action here that makes things worse, and it is reached for by mistake because it sits beside the others. It does not change an address - it disconnects the login from the contact, immediately. If it was that person's own login they cannot sign in at all afterwards, and you have turned a wrong email address into no access. Use it only when the login genuinely belongs to somebody else, such as a former payer or a sibling.

   An old or unexpected email on a login is not a reason to unassign it. Check whose name is on the login first - that is what tells you whether it belongs here.

6. They are in, but their children are missing

   Children do not have logins of their own, and people expect them to. A child appears on a parent's Portal because that parent is the pupil's Primary Contact or Secondary Contact - that link, and nothing about the child's own account, is what puts them in the family list. A child who is missing is almost always a child whose Primary Contact is somebody else, or is blank.

   So do not go looking for the child's login, and do not create one. Open the pupil, read the Contacts section on the Pupil tab, and correct that instead. These are the fields the desktop called Contact 1 and Contact 2.

7. A school's staff member signs in and sees no school

   This is the same question from the other direction, and it has a different answer. Somebody at a school reaches the Portal on their own login, but the school itself is not there. Their association with the organisation carries a Portal Access switch, and until it is on, the login works and the school stays invisible. Open their Associations tab, click the row for that organisation, and the switch is in the panel underneath.

   Portal Access is only offered where the job role allows it, so if it is not on the panel at all it is the role in the way rather than the person. A new association starts with it off. The same panel carries Send Schooble Invite, so somebody at a school who has no login can be invited from here rather than from the Identity tab.

Why this one is worth knowing

Sign-in questions arrive more often than anything else we have not written down, and they are nearly all one of the cases above. What makes them feel hard is that the obvious fix — correct the email on the contact — is the one thing that has no effect at all on signing in.

Hold on to the distinction and the rest follows. The contact is the person as your service records them. The Identity is how that person proves who they are to Paritor, and it is theirs across every role they hold and every service they deal with. One person, one Identity, however many hats. That is also why a login can carry an address you do not recognise and still be the right login.

The second habit worth having is to read the screen before acting on it. The Identity tab says whether there is a login, whose name is on it and what it signs in with. Nearly every bad outcome here — a parent locked out, a login detached from the wrong record — comes from changing something before reading that.

The same ground, as reference

• Identity — the tab in full, and every button on it
• The login's email is not the contact's email — the distinction, stated once and properly
• When they have none — creating, inviting and assigning, and what each does
• Your family's details — what a parent actually sees of their family once they are in
• Two records for the same person — the duplicate behind a login that reaches an empty record