Setting up Trips - 4. Managing participants

In this guide—the fourth in our series—we focus on managing the students who will be attending the trip. We'll detail how to add and remove participants, including how a student's place moves through the Eligible, Reserved, and Confirmed tabs based on sign-up and payment status. Furthermore, we’ll explain what this looks like for guardians using the Parent Portal and Parent App, and cover administrative tasks like recording manual payments, processing refunds, and transferring funds.

The guides in this series are:

1. Introduction
2. Creating the trip
3. Adding prices for paid trips
4. Managing trip participants
5. Troubleshooting, further reading and customisation
    

Adding and Removing Participants

You can view and manage participants from the Trip Participants section on the trip's overview page. This section is organised into various tabs that reflect the student's status.

The different tabs help you track the progress of students through the sign-up and payment process.

• Eligible: This tab contains all your selected eligible pupils.
• Reserved: Students who have contributed a part-paid (below the confirmation threshold) appear on this tab
• Confirmed: Students who are part-paid (above the threshold) and fully paid will appear in this tab.
• Cancelled: This tab contains students whose place on the trip has been cancelled.
• All: This tab shows all students associated with the trip.

You can use the tick boxes and Bulk action drop-down to sign students up or remove them from the trip manually.
 

The Eligible Tab

This tab contains a list of all students eligible for your trip, along with the total price they are expected to pay for the trip. You can manually sign students up to the trip by recording payments that put them over the confirmation threshold, or by confirming the student for the payment to be added later. The students shown here are determined by the eligible students you selected in Guide 2 of this series (see the Setting Trip Details section).

Use the bulk action on this tab to:

• Manually confirm a trip participant
• Log a manual cash, cheque or bank transfer payment record for a student (you cannot add card payments as an admin)
• Send communications to guardians
   

The Reserved Tab

If you allow instalments, this tab displays students who have made a payment towards the trip but have not contributed enough to be automatically confirmed via your Auto-Confirmation Threshold.

Students listed in this tab have not yet been confirmed for the trip. You can view this as a table of students who are eligible for the trip, have made a deposit, but - crucially - have not yet contributed the full deposit. The table also shows how much the student has already contributed, how much they still need to pay and what the total price for them is.

These students have a spot on the trip saved (i.e. they count towards your maximum participant numbers), but they do not have the trip on their calendars yet, nor do they show as confirmed on the trip to Parents and Guardians, for example.

The bulk actions on this page are identical to those on the Eligible tab. 

Click on a student to open a slide-over with further information, or to cancel their trip participations, or issue a refund.
 

The Confirmed Tab

This tab displays a list of students who are fully confirmed for the trip. The trip appears on their calendars, their place on the trip has been saved, and their parents will see them as confirmed for the trip on the Portal and App as well.

The table on this page has columns for the total price the student was charged for the trip, the amount they have paid (so far) and the amount they are still expected to pay. 

Use the Bulk Action to log further payments or send communications.

Click on a student to open a slide-over with further information, or to cancel their trip participations, or issue a refund.
 

What This Looks Like on the Parent Portal

If you allow parents to sign up through the Parent Portal and Parent App, they can register their children using the instructions provided in the guide Signing my child up for a Trip on the Parent Portal or the Parent App.

When a guardian views the trip on the Portal, they will see an overview including the trip's Location, Description, Trip dates, Sign-up window, and Price. They will also see if a Voluntary contribution is enabled.

A guardian whose child is not yet confirmed will see a status message (e.g., "Molly does not have a place on this trip yet") and a 'Sign up for trip' button to register.

Further reading on Manual Payments and Refunds

The payment status of a student is visible in the participants section, showing the Total Price, Amount Paid, and Amount Outstanding.

Manual Payments and Confirming Students: You can manually sign students up for the trip by recording payments or by simply signing them up for the payment to be added later. You can see how to do this in the Arbor Help Centre guide: Manually signing students up to a trip.

Managing Deposits and Refunds: Guidance on managing trip deposits, refunds, and transfers is covered in separate Arbor articles, including Manage trip deposits in Arbor, Add a previously cancelled trip participant and Cancelling Trip participation and making refunds

This concludes Guide 4: Managing Participants. You now know how to get students signed up, track their status, and handle payments. Our final guide, Guide 5: Troubleshooting, Further Reading, and Customisation, will cover making changes to your trip, addressing common issues, and pointing you toward advanced settings.