Case Studies
Background
The Lewis School of English was established by Mr Lewis in 1976 and has been owned and managed by myself, Alistair Walker since 1994. We are a fiercely independent school and have been accredited by British Council since 1989. We average 90 students in winter and 130 in summer. When we decided to change systems in autumn 2001 we had looked at Class but decided to sign an order with eMinerva, a company with its roots in Australia. It was a cheaper system and the supplier had made a number of promises to enhance its functionality for us. Nearly two years later the system was still not running correctly; slow, lacking in functionality, and full of bugs. Autumn 2003, we placed an order for Class.
Users Comments
Finance
Sharon, Financial/IT controller: "Integrated and automatic invoicing/proforma production (including e-mail) was a big step forward,our previous systems treated enrolments and invoicing as two separate processes. The Class Ledger was a big bonus; as an accountant I was not only impressed with the ease of use for any non accounting person, but also the seamless integration of accounting controls, often missed in other systems. Its unique design and layout, avoiding the use of accounting jargon makes all aspects of processing receipts and chasing debts easy. The Ledger settings, nominal codes etc. were easy to establish, and little help was needed with receipt postings and reporting. Using Class to 'spread' our income over the duration of the product e.g. course, has given us our first opportunity to produce accurate profit and loss figures by month."
"Class has been a huge success. Summer 2004 was one of our biggest junior summers and the agents were very impressed with the documentation produced and the speed with which we did it. If this had happened last year we couldn't have handled the bookings! Support from Infospeed was always prompt, helpful and to the point."
Enrolments
"We have many groups in the summer and Class with its copy options and batch (group) updates made entry and update quick and easy. It took a little time to create all our standard documents (Agent/Student/Family confirmations, certificates etc.) in Word, and to establish our own lists using quick reports, but the effort was all worthwhile as we now have a packaged system that feels like one designed just for us!"
Accommodation
"The matching routines helped us find families for our groups in a much more organised and logical way. We are fully up to speed with host family payments and all are automatically calculated by the system and paid directly into family bank accounts via Nat West's autopay."
Implementation
Lewis is a small independent school with excellent staff, possessing good school experience. The whole team was anxious to move forward and this helped get Class started in a matter of weeks. Infospeed imported into Class our old Streamline Agent and Family address details. This gave us a good start. Three days training saw us well on our way to knowing about agents, families, creation of master documents and price lists, followed by enrolments. The Lewis team were very computer literate and found the challenge of creating documents and quick reports both interesting and useful. Staff also went on two of the courses run by Infospeed at the English UK offices in London.
"Using Class was a breath of fresh air, there was a pre-installation planning meeting and the installation went ahead on the scheduled date."
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