My Institution

SETUP -> My Institution

This screen lets you view and customize settings that affect the way College Office looks or works. It is only accessible to users with the Administrator role as it contains extremely confidential information concerning your institution. The screen has 7 pages: Details, Custom, Settings, Academic Fees, Account, Invoices and Increments.

Details

This page shows the institution's name, logo, web site and contact information as it will appear on certain printed reports (for example transcripts).

Click on the lower right to download the latest encrypted backup of your data. This feature is only available if it has been enabled for your institution (contact us to enable it). The password used to encrypt your data can be seen or set via the Custom page of this screen: look for the Encryption Password field under the Backup category.

Click on the lower right to upload the logo for your institution.

Click on the lower right to edit this information via the Edit My Institution screen.

Custom

This page lists various fields used to customize College Office. Take the time to click on each row to read the description of that field and, if applicable, set its value. We can also add fields customized to the need of your institution to this page.

Of primary importance in this list are the fields of the EMAIL category which are used to record the parameters of the email account College Office will use to send emails on behalf of your institution as well as some formatting aspects. Check the help topic Sending emails via Google GMail if you are using GMail or the Google Business suite. If left empty, College Office will send emails from the noreply@collegeoffice.com email adress which is not recommended since emails will appear to students as coming from us rather than from your institution and will be discontinued in the Spring of 2023.

Settings

This page shows various settings that affect the way College Office operates. See the Settings section of the Edit My Institution help topic for a description of each field.

Click on the lower right to edit this information via the Edit My Institution screen.

Academic Fees

Use this page to create a default template of the student fees for your terms. When a new academic term is created, all the fees listed here will be automatically imported as the default fees for that term. This can all be overridden at the term level.

Click on the lower right to add fees.
Click on a row to edit that fee via the Edit Fee screen. Check the Edit Fee help topic for an explanation of each field.

Account

This page shows the details of your College Office account as well as the list of all your financial transactions.

Balance: your current balance if applicable.
Billing Period: is set to either Monthly if you are currently being billed on a monthly basis, or Billing Inactive if the automatic monthly billing has not yet been turned on for your account.
Base Fee: is your fixed monthly fee.
Student Fee: is your fee per active student per month.

If N is the number of active students on a given month, then your bill for that month will be [Base Fee] + N x [Student Fee].

Invoices

This page lists all the invoices received from us. Click on any line to to see that invoice. Click Print in the last column to print the invoice (your browser must accept popups from College Office: check the Reports help topic for details.)

Increments

Certain IDs in College Office such as student IDs can be automatically incremented if you choose to. Use this screen to determine the appearance of those IDs.

Table: name of the table for which an ID field is auto-incremented
Next Number: next value of that ID
Format: formatting string (Microsoft syntax) used to format the ID generated by College Office.

The list currently contains a single record, PERSON, used to control the auto-increment feature of the Person's ID field (see the Institution Assigned ID field in the Edit Person screen).

Click on a row to edit the Next Number and Format fields of that table via the Edit Auto Increment screen.