Splitting Parent Contacts — Badminton School

iSAMS Supports a joint contact for "Parents" this makes a lot of admin easier except for when those parents need to be separated for example due to a divorce. Parents that are no longer living together or have legally separated must be entered as individual contacts.

The process of splitting Parents on iSAMS is a little involved and must be done carefully to ensure the parents receive the best experience and their data is processed correctly.

Part 1 - Splitting the Contacts

Step 1 - Find the contact in the relevant Pupil Manager record.

Step 2 - Click on Edit contact and take a screenshot of the Contact Details and Address details tab. This ensures you have a copy of the original information to hand should anything go wrong.

Whichever parent is on the right side of the Parent contact is the one we need to now duplicate. In most cases this is the Mothers details however do not assume this is always the case.

Step 3 - Add a new contact for the Mother and enter in all the information from your screenshots earlier. Make sure you transfer SOS information if appropriate.

Step 4 - Re-open the original parent contact and change the relationship type to the person on the left of the Contact Details, in most cases this is now Father.

Step 5 - Remove any remaining data that references the Mother. Pay particular attention to the letter salutation and SOS contacts fields.

You should now have two separate contacts for Mother and Father.

Step 6 - Ensure the ‘student home’ box is ticked in the appropriate parent record (this creates the yellow star) to show where the pupils primary home is.

Step 7 - Add relevant / useful information for anyone contacting parents, in particular indicate if court order in place, or perhaps about the pupil’s living arrangements to ‘Contact Notes’ (above the address).

If you are unsure or the new parental arrangements are particularly sensitive, please check with IT Services to check everything is setup correctly.

Part 2 - Updating Portal Logins

Now that you have split the contacts, we need to destroy any existing portal logins and invite the parents to re-register. Without this, the existing contact may have access to each others contact information, a breach of GDRP and Data Protection laws. Firefly will already handle this automatically.

Remove the existing portal users via Parent Portal Manager or Control Panel.

Parent Portal Manager Method

Step 1 - Open the iSAMS Parent Portal Manager module

Step 2 - Navigate to Security

Step 3 - Find the parents' accounts from the alphabetical list.

Step 4 - Click on the parent's account and then Delete User.

Control Panel Method

Step 1 - Open the iSAMS Control Panel using the 3 dots at the bottom of the screen

Step 2 - Navigate to User Accounts and then click on Parents

Step 3 - Use the search bar with the binoculars to find the parents accounts one at a time. Try searching by Surname first or if that doesn't work use their email address.

Step 4 - Click on the parents account and then Delete User

Part 3 - Parent Comms

Step 1 - Email both parents separately to inform them that you have amended their details, also make sure they are aware that as part of the process their iSAMS logins will need to be re-registered and they will receive a follow up email shortly.

Step 2 - Send the Parent Portal registration email template "DATA - iSAMS portal re-register" to the parents.

Part 4 - Inform Accounts of the Change

Finally you must let accounts know that you have had to split the contacts, they will need to update billing information within the fees module. Failure to do so could result in the wrong parent getting the next bill or neither parents getting invoices at all!