A pupil is in the wrong lesson

Moving somebody from one activity to another - and what to do when the Transfer button is not there, which is most of the reason this comes up.

Step 1 of 7

Open the activity and select it

Find the pupil in Contacts, open the Pupil tab and then Activity. You will see every activity for the academic year in the box at the top. Nothing can be done to any of them yet - the panel just says to select one.

Untick Academic Year to see every year at once, and Hide ended items to drop the ones that have finished.

Use the arrow keys to move between steps.

1. Open the activity and select it

   Find the pupil in Contacts, open the Pupil tab and then Activity. You will see every activity for the academic year in the box at the top. Nothing can be done to any of them yet - the panel just says to select one.

   Untick Academic Year to see every year at once, and Hide ended items to drop the ones that have finished.

2. The buttons appear when you click the row

   Click the row - not the tick box, and not the venue, which is a link to the school. Four buttons appear above the list: Create Invoice, Edit Start Date, Transfer and Withdraw. This is the step people miss, and it is why the commonest transfer question we get is "the Transfer button has disappeared".

   The panel beside it shows who is being charged, the teacher, and the activity - worth a glance before you move anything.

3. Two questions, and that is the whole form

   Transfer asks which activity to move to and from what date. The list is not limited to the school they are at - it offers every activity you could put them in, at any venue. Transferring is how somebody changes school mid-year, as well as how they change instrument or day.

   Set the date on or after their start date in the current lesson. A date before it makes the system try to end the old record before it began, and you get an error instead of a transfer.

4. If there is no Transfer button at all

   The activity is not in a lesson yet. An application the teacher has accepted is still only accepted - it sits waiting to be put into a session, and until it is, there is nothing to transfer. Send it back to the waiting list with the reverse arrow, edit the application and use Find Venue to pick the new school, then drag them off that school's waiting list into the lesson.

   Two separate customers reported this as a missing button in the same month. It is the usual cause when the row is there but the buttons are not.

5. You cannot transfer between academic years

   Transfers work inside one year. To move a pupil to a new school for next year, change the school on their Pupil tab and let progression carry them across - it will find the matching activity at the new school. If you are part way through a year, transfer during it, or transfer next year's record rather than this one's.

   That holds whether or not the parent has an email address. Changing the school on the pupil record is the route either way.

6. The money moves by itself

   There is no button for moving payments any more, and that is deliberate. When an invoice goes into credit, the credit pays whatever the same person still owes on their other bookings, instalment plans shrink to match so nothing is collected that is not owed, and anything left over becomes a pending refund for you to approve.

   So after a transfer, look at the debtor's invoices rather than hunting for a transfer-the-payment option. If a new invoice has not appeared at all, that is one for us.

7. If they do not turn up in the new lesson

   The transfer worked but the destination had nowhere to put them: the plan you picked has no timetable behind it, so there are no sessions to join. Check the plan has sessions, and look carefully for two plans with the same name - picking the empty one closes the old record and leaves the pupil nowhere.

   The giveaway is that the old sessions are still there as well. Tell us if you hit it - putting the sessions right is quicker from our side.

Why this one is worth knowing

Almost every transfer question turns out to be one of three things, and none of them is the transfer itself.

The button looks missing because the row has not been clicked, or because the activity is only Teacher Accepted and so is not in a lesson. The transfer is refused because it crosses an academic year, or because the date is before the pupil started. And the money looks wrong because people go looking for a button that was deliberately taken away - it is automatic now.

Teachers doing their own

Teachers can transfer from the Portal, but only for parent-billed pupils and only where the school and the activity are the same - moving somebody from Tuesday to Thursday, in effect. It is off until it is switched on, under Allow Teachers To Do Simply Transfers in Configuration.

The same ground, as reference

• Transfers — the screen in full
• Progression — moving between academic years
• Finishing and withdrawing — when they are leaving rather than moving