Setting up a Trip

This article provides a guide on setting up trips for students, including permissions required, steps to create a trip, and how to manage payments. It outlines the process for both free and paid trips, including adding prices, managing participant eligibility, and using the Parent Portal for sign-ups.

You can set up free or paid trips for you to manually manage, or for guardians to sign up to through the Parent Portal and Parent App.

Permissions

• School: Extra Curricular: Administer - Set up and manage trips
• Finance: Administer - Manage payments for trips

If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Recreating a trip that had payments made last academic year

It is not possible to copy a trip - you will need to create it again. If you want to take payments for a trip happening next year, you'll need to set up two trips - one for this year to take payments, and one for next year to schedule the actual trip. 

It is not possible to copy a trip - you will need to create it again.

Please follow these instructions to set up your secondary trip: Copying over a trip into next academic year

Creating a new trip

Step 1 - Add the trip

Go to School > Activities > Trips and click + Add to set up a new trip. Select whether your trip will be free or if parents can or should pay.

A slide over will appear with information regarding your trip to be filled out:

• Name
• Location - Where is the trip to?
• Staff - Which staff members are going? Staff members assigned here will also be able to take attendance for the trip if they have the Attendance: Administer My Students permission.
• Trip start and end date and time - When the trip starts and finishes
• Link to - Is this trip linked to any courses or clubs in Arbor, for example, a Geography trip would be linked to the Geography course
• Pupils eligible - Select 'all enrolled students' for all students to be to go on the trip. Narrow down to an appropriate group if only certain students should be able to sign up. See how to add students who will be attending next year here: Custom Group for Clubs next year
• Max participants - Guardians won't be able to sign their child up once the max capacity is reached.
• Consent required? (free trips only) - Guardians will need to tick a box when paying to say they consent. See further details here: Trip consents and collection arrangements. As a student's place on a paid trip is confirmed with the payment made towards it, there is no consent required field visible to guardians when they sign up. 
  
• Take Attendance - If this is ticked a register will be created for the trip

If you'd like guardians to sign up through the Parent Portal or Parent App, you'll need to add open and close dates. These determine when parents can sign their children up and make payments for the trip.

Step 2 (for paid trips) - Add prices

Once complete, you will then add in the payment amount for your students by selecting +Add within Trip Prices.

Here you can choose:

• The price and VAT rate for the trip
• Whether to enable Voluntary Contribution - please read the guidance here for what enabling this will mean: What is a voluntary or variable contribution?
• Whether parents can pay towards the price of a trip in instalments
• The minimum instalment amount (must be at least £1)
• An auto-confirmation threshold that, once paid, will confirm a child's place on the trip
• Whether or not to show the payment amount outstanding for the trip on the Parent Portal and in the MIS. If this function is set to No, the amount outstanding will display £0.00.

Please note: Instalments for Trips only allows you to set up the minimum amount that guardians can pay at a time towards the trip so that they can pay over multiple instances. If you want a deadline for trip instalments, we would recommend either setting up several trips to denote each instalment and deadline (along with another to show when the actual trip will be taking place), or sending out communications to guardians advising them of your deadlines.

If you wish to add an alternative price for a different pupil group, for example for pupil premium students, select +Add and create another price. When complete, click Save.

The price the guardian will need to pay will be the lowest price set for the student - great for applying discounts to certain students!

Need to set up separate prices where students need to pay more than the base amount? You'll need to set custom groups - one for the students paying the base amounts, and one more for each price point. You'll then be able to add a price for each group.

Finally, in Trip Participants your selected eligible pupils will sit within the Eligible tab. Students who have been provisionally added to the trip will appear in the Reserved tab. Part-paid and fully paid students will appear in the Confirmed tab.

Signing students up for the trip

To sign students up to the trip, you can record payments or just sign the student up for the payment to be added later. You can see how to do this here: Manually signing students up to a trip

If you use the Parent Portal and Parent App at your school and have allowed parents to sign up through there, they can sign their children up using these instructions: Signing my child up for a Trip on the Parent Portal or the Parent App