How to Change the Low/Negative Balance Rules

Minimum version: BrightArrow Base 2 v23.01.04

The low/negative balance rules allow schools to set up their own business logic for what is considered a low, negative or extreme negative balance so that reminders can be sent to the students, parents, or staff. The default settings can be set at the district level but each school can also set their own settings if they need something different. The recommendation is to set the default at the district that represents the most common settings and only change the individual buildings that need something different. Most schools set up rules district wide only

PowerQueries that use these filters

BrightArrow Low Balance1 - Student
BrightArrow Low Balance1 - User

Getting to the filter settings

Navigate to Settings > BrightArrow Settings
Click on Filters. If doing this from District Office then select the filters in the row corresponding to the district or specific school you wish to alter.
The filter options will slide in. Click on Lookup Rules
Lookup Rules contains the various settings that can change by school organized by topic. Click on Fees
Find the Low/Negative Balance Rules section

What are the options?

Low Threshold: Low balances are $0.01 to this. Use this setting to set the maximum value to be considered a low balance

Default: 0 -> 0 means do not include any low balances
Other Options:
- Any positive number -> Enter a number above 0 to include low balances up to that amount.

Negative Threshold: Negative balances are anything below $-0.01. Use this setting if you want to separate negative from extreme negative. The value entered here will be where the separation happens. PowerSchool's export will send either that the value is Negative or Xtreme based on this value. Enter 0 to not separate regular negative and extreme negative

Default: 0 -> 0 means do not separate regular negative from extreme negative
Other Options:
- Any positive number -> Enter a number above 0 to set a threshold from where a balance goes from negative to extreme negative. Values should be entered as a positive number and the query will make that value negative.

Exclude Lunch Status: If you do not want to send any messages at all for a specific lunch status you may exclude it completely. Used when a school does not want to send negative balances to Free students.

Default: Enabled in Exports > Include students with this lunch status
Other Options:
- Disabled from Exports -> Exclude students with this lunch status

What are the 3 levels?

Low balances are balances that are not negative yet but approaching 0. What that cutoff is is up to you. Generally these are sent once a week and we typically see these sent on Sunday evenings though you can send them whenever you want.
1. Set to 0 and nothing above 0 will be sent, only values below 0.
Negative balances are balances that are less than 0. We often see these sent twice a week.
Extreme negative balances are balances far below 0, you set the cutoff and we often see these set to anything less than -50. Because of the nature of these we often see these run more frequently, even Sunday-Thursday evenings.
1. This concept is not for everyone. If you do not wish to separate regular negative from extreme negative simply leave the negative box set to 0.

What are the 4 rows for?

The first 3 rows all report on students. They allow you to set different thresholds based on the lunch status of the student. Previously if you wanted different thresholds based on lunch status you would need to send us the lunch status field, not a great thing to be sending. This allows you to set your thresholds and we'll never see your settings or if they are different based on lunch status. PowerQueries that use these filters will evaluate based on lunch status but never include the lunch status field in the export so it never gets sent outside of PowerSchool.

Free = Lunch Status of F or FDC
Reduced = Lunch Status of R or RDC
Paid = Lunch Status of P

The 4th row is for staff thresholds. Some schools want to send reminders to staff as well when they are low or owe money. If you'd like to send staff balance reminders you can set those here and the PowerQuery will obey those settings.

Why are there only 2 Exclude options?

To date the only exception has been for Free students to be excluded. The reduced was added in case someone decides to only send to Paid students. There is no need to add an exclude option for Paid or Staff because if you aren't sending to Paid you just don't send at all, no one sends to Free but not Paid. And if you don't want to send to staff, that's it's own export so just don't send that export.

I have a school that wants different settings from the rest of the district

If you have different schools needing different settings you can do that as well. First set up the district default by changing the filters in the District row. That will become the default for all schools that are not overriding. Once that is done go to the school that needs different settings and click on Filters for that school. At the very top you will see "Use Settings From:". Change that to either "Do not link" to be independent, or if another school already has the correct settings you may also choose that school's abbreviation in the drop down and the 2 schools will be linked making one school use the other school's settings so you only need to make changes once.