Support

December 11, 2014 at 4:19 am

My initial thoughts when looking at this was for you to use EE4. While EE4 is still under active development it currently has some features which will make your life easier.

There are a couple of downsides with using EE4 as it doesn’t have a discount system yet (coupons etc) and it doesn’t have waitlists yet.

As such I’ve answered your questions based on EE3, but I’ve mentioned where EE4 might be better suited accordingly.

Everyone who registers for any of our classes needs to pay an annual $42 registration fee.

2 options here:

First use a third party membership plugin separate to EE to register them on your site and bill them annually.

Second use an event to do this. The problem with this method is that a) it won’t renew them or cancel membership and b) it can be ignored by users.

Next they would choose a class to attend. We bill for classes in 4-week sessions, and classes are typically 1-2 days per week. We pro-rate the fee if they sign up mid session.

The 4 week sessions are not an issue though the pro-rata isn’t a default setting. You could however add them manually in the admin and set the price paid there to be less than the actual ticket price or (from the front end) use a discount code (or 3) to discount the price accordingly (e.g. if they arrive 2 weeks in, use a 50% discount).

EE4 can handle the four week sessions better on the calendar as it splits the days up.

At the end of each session we don’t require students to re-register for the next session. They are automatically carried over into the next session and billed accordingly.

Not possible in EE, each event is separate and a user will need to register for each one they wish to attend.

We have 2 different fee structures for our classes. There is a 1-day per week fee and a reduced 2-day per week fee. So in a Monday pre-school class, not every kid is paying the same rate. Some kids come 1 day per week and pay the full price. Other kids come 2 days per week and pay a discounted rate per day.

That can be easily done in both EE3 and EE4 by using either separate events or tickets. EE4 does handle this with more grace though.

We also offer sibling discounts. The first child pays the full rate, the 2nd child gets a discounted rate, the 3rd child gets a more discounted rate, etc…

Unfortunately EE3 doesn’t have a tiered discount system with as many levels like that so it makes that type of discount system difficult.

EE4 might be able to handle that better.

Though EE4 doesn’t yet have a discount addon (it’s being worked on) it could handle it better by having multiple tickets with different prices.

For example, Ticket A is for one child only and costs $10. Ticket B is for min/max 2 children and costs $9 each therefore an automatic $18. And so on. It’s rare that someone has over 5 kids but this can be handled in EE4 by simply saying minimum 5 is X per ticket.

In 1 week, we offer 44 classes across 8 categories. Parent Tot, PreSchool, Beginning Boys, Beginning Girls, Boys Pre-Team, Boys Team, Girls Pre-Team, Girls Team.
The majority of our classes are full and have waiting lists. So this also needs to be managed.

You can set up waiting list events in EE3, so that is not an issue. However you will need to manually monitor and move attendees as spaces become available.

EE4 does not currently have a waitlisting system in place.

Lastly, our customers register in person and there is very little use for a customer facing registration interface. Although we may move in that direction. But we need the ability to quickly register people in person. I’m not sure if we do that on a web page, or if we handle that inside of WP EE plugin?

Well, EE is designed to be an online registration system. As an admin, you can certainly add the users via the back end though going through the front end might be a little easier for staff, especially if the customer wants to pay by an online method (e.g. PayPal). If it is just cash then it’s doesn’t matter if you use the admin or front end.

I hope that helps but if you have more questions just let me know.

Also, the core EE4 plugin is currently part of your EE3 licence so you have access to it to test. If you want a pre-installed test site, head over to http://demoee.org which is our EE4 test drive site.