The September Truss RTO release is now being gradually deployed across our network.

This month's update introduces two brand new major features, the Student Merge Tool and Booking Options, as well as a range of minor improvements.

Student Merge Tool

The next time you click on Student Database underneath Student Management in your left hand sidebar, you might see the following prompt:

The Truss RTO system will now scan through all available student records and attempt to identify potential duplicate records to merge. Duplicates might arise when students enrol without a USI, or data has come from external sources (including paper forms or imports from your legacy system). Click on Resolve Duplicates to start the Student Merge Tool, and you will then see exactly how many duplicate students the software has found.

Each pair of matched student records will display the “old” and “new” data on the left and right sides of the screen respectively and in the middle you will see a “Confidence Rating” which is at a glance how likely these student records belong to the same person.

You can either choose to keep the old or new data, or you can click on the “Resolve in Merge Tool” button on the right hand side to merge the old and new student records together.

To Merge two student records together inside the merge tool, simply click to select which fields are correct (e.g Name, Email Address, Phone Number etc) Once you’ve selected all of the correct data, click the “Merge Selected Fields” button at the very bottom and you’re done!

This tool is incredibly useful at cleaning up older imported data, or to merge student records that could have accidentally been created. Truss RTO gives you the tools to manage your own student data yourself.

Booking Options

The 2nd major feature in this release is the Booking Options setup. A Booking Option is either:

• An optional item that students can add when beginning a booking for a specific Subject,
• An elective that a student can choose (or pay) to enrol into
• A mandatory check required to begin booking (such as agreement to a student handbook)

To access the new Booking Options menu, open Training Admin, then edit any Subject that you would like to apply options to. You’ll notice a new tab across the top of the subject editor, called “Booking Options”. Open this up and you can see the currently configured Options, with the ability to add more.

Once you click on the “Add a Booking Option” button, you will see a popup window allowing you to configure the option. You can set a specific subject for the option (or apply it to all subjects, a handy option for getting your students to read a student handbook for example).

There is also a tickbox to charge a fee for the Option if required, simply tick the box and you can apply a price which is added to the student's ordinary booking fee.

Date/Time Picker Improvements

Included in the September release are improvements to the Calendar Date/Time picker, you will now see an easier to use calendar when you apply a date to a class in the Scheduled Classes menu. The date picker will now default to the current month, and you can easily scroll forwards/backwards through months to pick the date that you’re after. Based on feedback from our users we have also added in a button to select the current date (this is the crosshair icon at the bottom of the date picking window)

Minor Additions and Upgrades

There are also a number of other changes that are part of the release; here are those you're likely to notice day to day:

• A colour scheme change - this has been done both to update the branding of the platform but also to improve readability.
• A number of minor labelling changes for clarity across the system
• Improvements to archiving of certificate information (all text is snapshotted permanently to ensure reissues of certificates are worded identically to the original no matter what configuration changes have been made since)
• Improvements to email delivery configuration

We look forward to your feedback, and hope this month's release continues to improve your experience with our product.