Responsible signers needs a complete overhaul
There are two full pages of ideas expressing frustration with responsible signers in EMS, many of them relating specifically to how they interface with Tuition Management. It is a total nightmare for parents in split families, blended families, step-siblings where one parent is the same but not the other one, and so on.
Grandparents sometimes pay tuition for their grandchildren, who have different parents, and those parents need to be able to sign school forms, but because the grandparent needs to be the sole responsible signer on the contract, the parents are prevented from seeing school forms. Allowing the parent access to school forms prevents the grandparent from completing an integrated contract.
In a couple of extreme cases we have needed to leave deceased parents on accounts and cannot add a new step-parent when the surviving parent remarries because it causes responsible-signer conflicts between EMS and BBTM. Think about how it would feel - on either side! - for a school to need to tell a parent that because of how a database is set up, we need to leave a deceased spouse on a student's account for the duration of the student's enrollment so that a contract integration would work correctly.
In 2024, with how family situations have become unique and continue to evolve, this is completely unacceptable. It makes schools look clueless at best, and heartless at worst. This setup absolutely must be reimagined from the ground up.
At a minimum, please consider the following:
Separate "responsible form signer" from "responsible for tuition". In some cases a single parent is responsible for all of tuition. Even if the parents are not linked as spouses in EMS, they will be attached in BBTM, and the school needs to remember every year to go in and remove the parent that is not responsible so that Blackbaud knows not to provide financial access to that parent.
Allow for contract integration in situations where parent A has two children, one of whom has parent B and the other has parent C (or similar situations). Currently, parent A can only do an integrated contract with one or the other, but not both.
If there is a change in responsible signers in EMS from one contract year to the next, allow for school staff to approve that change in Tuition Management so that billing history can remain consistent and mistakes can be fixed without requiring continuous manual contract returns and account rollovers.
Our students are in many cases with us for a decade or longer, and their living situations can change constantly during that time. We need to ensure that the databases can keep up with those changes, and right now they are not doing so. Any progress toward being able to do so, however incremental, would be welcomed.
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Brian LeBlanc
- Jan 10 2024
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Split Households
Merged Please look into a more efficient way for split households with multiple children and different responsible signers. We have to create a non integrated contract and manually enter the data for one student. We get a lot of error messages as does th...1
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Equity for blended families when issuing contracts with Tuition Managment Integration
Merged Currently, Tuition Management integration requires that the exact same responsible signers are listed on each contract in order to allow seamless submission under a single user. This creates a host of problems for our blended families, as multiple...0
Related ideas
This is defiantly needed, our school has recently been threated with a law suit because a parent not finically responsible for tuition was to access the ex parent's BBTM account through the resource tab. I think the resource tab is an assume resource for parents however it should open work for the parent login and not the student on the account.
Returning here to point out another issue with blended families: our policy is that only parents listed on birth certificates, plus court-identified guardians with supporting custodial paperwork, may sign contracts. Since we only require one signature on contracts (as a courtesy to the overwhelming majority of parents who do not need co-signers), we have run into legal issues in the past where a step-parent signed a contract and later disclaimed responsibility for tuition, leaving us holding the bag: the step-parent did not have custody, and thus contended the contract was no longer valid, and the custodial parent never signed the contract and contended that they had no responsibility for payment.
As a result, we have parents and guardians set up to be responsible signers, but step-parents are not, as a rule.
Consider this situation, though: children A and B are in a home with parents X and Y. X is the mom of both children. Y is the dad of A but the stepdad of B. If A's contract is signed first, then Tuition Management locks in both X and Y as responsible signers in the family. However, Y should not be a responsible signer for B, per our policy.
The only ways around this are: (a) a non-integrated contract and a manual addition to the existing Tuition Management account, or (b) a violation of our policy to add Y as a responsible signer for B to make it work within Blackbaud's limitations.
Neither of these are reasonable long-term solutions, yet they are the only ones that will work.
The amount of time my coworkers and I have used this year addressing this problem is absolutely absurd! I implore Blackbaud to fix this situation ASAP!
Absolutely needed! Another issue is the inability to remove a signer once a contract is generated.
Totally agree! I joined Blackbaud Community to make essentially this exact post! Not only does this greatly impact domestic students, we have similar issues happening with our international student contracts as well. Agents and parents legally both need to sign, but agents don't want parents to have anything to do with BBTM and when asking BB for any solutions, the answers provided are:
Create two separate contracts, one that is integrated with BBTM and one that is not, which doubles the work for the people publishing contracts. We also have three separate contracts for international students and would have to reflect those with non-integrated contracts as well.
Make a single parent and the agent sign the single contract and then manually remove the parent information in BBTM, which adds more work the more students you have that require this update (which is most of our international students).
Not having this ability severely limits an efficient workflow and is causing a lot of issues with the integration of EM and TM. Also, only allowing two signers greatly affects situations like these as well. Definitely in need of a total overhaul.