Students & families

The roster is one table with two views — Families and Students — flipped with the switch above it. The Families view lists households: expand any family to see its contacts (the primary contact is badged), the emergency contact, and the students attached to it. Each family shows at a glance whether it can sign in — a green 'Has account' badge once its portal login exists, amber 'Not invited yet' until then — and families that came in through your trial widget wear a 'Trial' badge until their registration fee is settled, when it flips to 'Full member'. The Students view lists every dancer across the studio with their family, level, status, and attendance.

Both views are searchable and sortable, and filters narrow the list to exactly who you are looking for. In the Families view, filter by portal account (has an account, or not invited yet), billing status, membership (trial or full member), registration fee status (when your studio charges one), and — for multi-location studios — home location; in the Students view, filter by status and level, and sorting the list by level follows the order of your studio's levels rather than the alphabet. The Students view's filters are kept in the page's web address, so a filtered list survives a refresh and can be bookmarked or shared with a colleague — and clicking a level on the dashboard's 'Students by level' chart brings you here the same way, with that level's active dancers already showing. 'Show archived' brings archived families back into view, Clear resets everything, and on smaller screens the filters tuck behind a single Filters button that counts what is applied.

Admins can grow the roster two ways: create a family by hand, or import many families at once. Invite each family from their row when you're ready — create a setup link, then copy it, share on WhatsApp or text, or email it with a button that names exactly who will receive it. Creating the link never sends anything by itself. (There is a third way, too: share your studio's family sign-up link and let households create their own accounts — see below.)

A new family's billing status starts as Manual (e-transfer / cheque) — nothing is billed automatically until the family sets up autopay themselves. You can instead mark them Past due or Paused as you create them; Active (Stripe autopay) is not offered here, because it switches on by itself once the family completes card setup.

1. 1In the Families view, choose Create family (or Import to bring in a list).
2. 2Fill in the family name and contacts. The emergency contact is optional — add it whenever you have one, here or later from Manage family.
3. 3Open the family and use Add student to attach each dancer with their name, birthdate, level, and any notes worth keeping on the dancer — allergies, medical conditions, past injuries.
4. 4When you are ready, invite the family: create their setup link, then copy it, share on WhatsApp, or email it — creating the link never sends anything by itself.

You do not have to invite every household one by one. Your studio also has a family sign-up link — a page in your studio's branding where a family creates its own portal account with just a name, an email, and a password, and lands signed in to the portal. Share it however suits you: in a welcome email, a WhatsApp group, a newsletter, or a poster at the front desk.

A family that signs up this way appears on your roster right away as a household with no dancers yet, with billing set to Manual — so nothing is billed until you add their students and set their levels. If the email matches a family already on your roster that has no portal account, the sign-up connects to that existing family instead of creating a duplicate.

1. 1On Settings → Branding, find the Family sign-up link card and switch on 'Allow family self-signup'.
2. 2Copy the link from the card, or share it on WhatsApp straight from there.
3. 3Families open the link, enter their name, email, and a password, and land signed in to your portal.

A family's login email — the address they type on the sign-in page — is kept separate from their contact emails on the roster, so tidying up a contact never breaks anyone's sign-in. Once a family has a portal account, open Invite family from their row and the dialog leads with their login email: it shows the address they currently sign in with, and the pencil button lets you change it — to fix a typo, or to follow a parent to a new address. Their password stays the same; only the email they sign in with changes.

A family invited by link without an email on file can use that link to get in, but has no email login yet. The same panel is where you give them one: enter their address and choose Set login email. From then on they sign in with that email — and it becomes the username to use if you set them a password from the 'Set a password' side of the dialog.

Everything about a household is edited in one place: open the family's actions menu and choose Manage family. The dialog has four tabs — Details for the family name, contacts, emergency contact, notes, and (for studios with more than one location) a home location; Students for adding and editing the family's dancers; Billing for tuition, billing status, Stripe autopay setup links, and the registration fee; and Payments for that family's outstanding charges and payment history, with the same mark-paid, void, refund, and record-payment actions as the studio ledger. Each tab saves on its own, so fixing a phone number never touches the money.

Tuition is driven by each student's plan, not a single number on the family. By default a student's level chooses their plan: set their level (one of the dance levels your studio defines on the Branding tab) and they bill on that level's plan, with its own price and billing interval (monthly, quarterly, every 6 months, or yearly). A family's tuition is simply the sum of its active students' plan prices, so a household with two dancers at different levels bills the combined total automatically.

You change what a family pays on each student's record (open a family and edit or add a student), not by typing a family-wide amount. Usually that means setting the student's level — the form shows each level's price as you choose it. When a level has more than one plan, or a dancer needs a specific package, use the student form's Tuition plan field to put them on an exact plan instead: the dancer then bills that plan, and their level follows the plan automatically. Switching the field back to 'None — bill by dance level' returns them to their level's pricing. On the roster, the tuition column shows each family's amount with how often it bills (like /mo or /quarter); a family whose students sit on plans with different billing intervals is marked 'Mixed intervals', and a family on a seasonal break (a $0 month) shows a small 'Resumes' note with the month tuition picks back up and the amount — so a paused family never looks like one with no tuition set.

When a household needs something different from the per-student sum — a discount, a flat family rate, or a custom seasonal schedule — open Manage family and set a tuition override on the Billing tab. An override replaces the summed student plans for that family rather than layering on top of them, and it keeps their live Stripe subscription in step automatically.

The Billing tab opens with a plain sentence describing what a family's billing actually is right now — on autopay, paying you outside Stripe, paused, or flagged past due — so the label never hides the reality underneath. Two statuses are kept truthful automatically and are never yours to set by hand: a family becomes Active only by completing autopay card setup, and flips to Manual when their autopay is cancelled.

The statuses you can set do real work. Past due flags a family on your roster. Paused genuinely stops collection: for a family on autopay, choosing Paused pauses their Stripe subscription (the save confirms it) and it stays paused until you set them back to Active, which resumes billing at the scheduled amount. The same rules apply in the iPhone app, so a status set from your phone means exactly the same thing.

If your studio charges a registration fee, Ida OS tracks it per family. Turn it on under Settings → Payments & Bookings ('Charge a registration fee') and set the default amount; each family then carries a clear status — due, paid, or waived — and nothing is ever billed automatically. With the registration form enabled, families can pay the fee themselves from their portal, and if your registration renews each year or by term, the status resets each period so returning families are asked again — see the Registration page of this guide.

To collect by hand, open Manage family and use the Registration section of the Billing tab: create a secure Stripe payment link, record the fee as paid outside Stripe (cash, e-transfer), or waive it. Creating a link never emails anyone by itself — the link appears first, and you then choose whether to copy it (to share by text or WhatsApp) or email it, with the button naming exactly who will receive it. A family that should pay a different amount can carry its own override of the studio-wide fee — the override wins everywhere, including the family's own portal checkout.

When a family or student leaves, prefer Archive (for families) or Mark inactive (for students). This keeps their history and stops billing without erasing anything. Permanent deletion is available but deliberately blocked when there is payment or booking history — Ida OS will tell you to archive instead so your books stay intact.

The Families tab carries the roster with you: search by the family's name or any of its students' names, and each card lists the household's dancers and tuition total at a glance, labeled with how often it bills (like /mo or /quarter). Badges appear only when something needs you — past due, paused, a registration fee still owed, or a family not yet invited to the portal. Add family creates a household on the spot, and the More button holds the setup-time tools: Import roster to bring in a whole list, and Bulk invite to send sign-in links to every family that does not have one yet. Opening a family shows the same Details, Students, Billing, and Payments panes as the web — Payments appears for admins — with a summary bar that keeps the status and tuition amount in view.