We added some great new additions to the product that we wanted to share with you! These updates are primarily aimed at giving partners even greater flexibility in choosing how they setup their registrations and how they collect and track payments from participants. Here’s a overview of what’s included.

Payment Plans

The payment plans feature is a powerful addition to the registration tools. It allows a partner to collect and track registration payments from their members in a series of installments at specific due dates. This is great for partners who offer more expensive and/or longer running programs for which they would like to allow their participants to pay in multiple separate installments, part of a greater total, over time.

Key Benefits of Payment Plans

Here are some of key features that make payments plans so powerful:

• Partners can create and manage multiple payment plans per program. This is great if you want to offer different payment plan options, each with a slightly different overall fee and payment schedule.
• Registering participants can choose to either pay the full program fee up front, or select one of the available payment plans.
• Automatic installment reminder emails stay on top of payment collections on your behalf. You can specify when you want the reminder emails to be sent, and how often you want follow-up emails to be sent after due dates.
• Tracking of payment plan statuses is easy. The manager console includes status information on all participants’ payment plans, allowing partners to track and manage outstanding plans.
• Messaging members with outstanding balances is a cinch. The messaging tool now supports filtering recipients by specific outstanding amount owed. This new filtering capability allows partners to target their members based on the overall amount they still owe (within a specified range).

Learn more about how to get started with using Payment Plans by reading our support article How to Create Payment Plans for your Organization.

Registration Feature Updates

We also made a number of significant enhancements to other registration tools. Many of these updates came from careful review of your feedback.

Custom registration fields for staff
Registration form fields can now be customized to collect information specific to various staff roles. This is useful if you want to collect certain types of information from only Coaches, or from only Volunteers, but not from players.

Registration by Division
If you use divisions to organize your teams within a program, you can now have your team captain or coach select the division themselves as they are registering and setting up the team. You have the option to turn this feature on or off.

Partial payments
We made improvements to the partial payments feature so that it now accepts partial payments in all possible registration scenarios. This feature is useful if you like to allow members to pay a “down payment” up front, and then pay the remainder of the registration fee later by a specified due date.

Family Account Improvements

We made some important enhancements to some settings and features that support the use of Family Accounts.

• Child vs Parent DOB requirement. Partners can now specify in settings (Settings > Member Profile) to require the child birthdate while NOT requiring the parent birthdate.
• Full parental access to child invoices. Multiple parents in the same family account (e.g., both the Mother and Father) can now both access and pay invoices for any of their childrens’ registrations.
• Full parental information in registration report export. The registration report export now includes the name and email address for ALL parents in each child participant’s family account.

Messaging Enhancements

We added a couple key enhancements to messaging related features. Check them out.

Member-to-member messaging restriction
There is now a setting (under Settings > Site Settings) that allows partners to restrict the ability of their members to message/email other members. The possible options are:

• Any logged in member can message any other member.
• Only members within the same programs can message each other.
• Only members within the same teams can message each other.

This gives our partners the choice of how much or how little direct member-to-member messaging they want to allow among their members.

Inline collection of cell phone during registration
Your members are now automatically asked for their cell phone number during the registration process. This allows you to capture your members’ phone numbers in the right format for later use. This new field also ties into the Text Messaging app, automatically opting in your members to receive texts once they provide their cell number during registration. You have the option to turn this feature on or off, under Settings > Member Profile.

Additional Updates

There are a few other updates included in this release that we wanted to share:

Console notifications
You’ll now notice a new ‘notification’ alert icon in the top right of browser when you’re logged into the manager console. We’ll use this to make important and useful announcements that you should be aware of, as a LeagueApps partner.

What’s New page
We added a new page in the manager console that lists all the release notes from previous releases. If you missed a recent release, check out this page to get the overview. This page can be accessed from the console user drop down menu that appears when you click your name in the upper right of the console.

Performance and infrastructure upgrades
We’re always monitoring and making improvements to the underlying infrastructure that powered the platform. In this release, we added a number of optimizations and enhancements to the underlying technology — aimed at increasing stability and speed performance of your LeagueApps account.

As always, we’re here and looking forward to any questions or comments you have as you check out the new features. Let us know!