What is a Session and How Does it Affect My Billing?

When thinking about sessions, it's best to ask yourself "When do my teachers need access to their students to do lesson planning, record keeping, or to catch up on any photo tagging or conference report generating?".  

You can have one or more sessions per year, most often a school year session and a summer session. 

Sessions are important because they are how we bill you. We base your bill on the number of children enrolled in your current session. This number can fluctuate as you add or remove children from a session. We will prorate you for any children who were added or removed, based on the number of days they were in the current session. 

Since the cost of Transparent Classroom is based on the number of active children per month and we pro-rate it by the day, we collect the number of children active on your account each day. It is important to confirm that your session dates are what you want before the dates pass since changing the dates afterwards will not effect your invoice.

You always want there to be a current session. When you set session dates, you always want a date to be covered by a session. Set the start date of one session immediately following the end date of the previous session. This will protect from any unexpected charges. If your session dates don't match up, the system will automatically jump to the next session and say it's the current one (even if the start date is still in the future). This may cause you to be billed several weeks before the teachers need access to the children at your school. 

If a session is empty, you don't have to pay for Transparent Classroom during that time. However, you will still have admin access and be able to do things such as processing applications, enrollment, and other admin tasks. Teachers will not be able to tag children from the [Activity] page, their lesson plan will be empty, and the Progress & Plan page will be blank. If they use the session dropdown in the upper right of the P&P page to see future or past sessions and plan lessons, those lessons will not appear on the [Lesson Plan] page until the first day of the chosen session. 

You can update your session dates by going to [Admin] > [Sessions] > [Edit]. Sessions cannot overlap and we recommend removing all gaps between sessions so you do not receive any unexpected invoices.

Please refer to these additional articles to see some examples of sessions: End-of-Year Admin Chores and When the Children Disappear.

As always, please reach out to us at info@transparentclassroom.com if you have any questions!