We’re excited to announce the latest OpenApply features and enhancements, designed to boost the user experience, streamline workflows, and empower your team with supercharged admissions, advancement, and alumni engagement.
Advancement Updates
We’re making it easier for schools to build strong relationships with alumni and donors. OpenApply’s Advancement module offers flexible new tools to plan events, keep alumni records updated, and launch effective fundraising campaigns.
Advancement Events
Create meaningful moments that bring your community Together, on or off campus. Whether it’s a reunion, gala dinner, giving day, or networking night, you’ll have the tools you need to make it polished and professional.
Our enhancements include new event types for faster setup, full support for off-campus events, and customizable landing pages to promote events and increase signups.
Alumni Network and Community Management
A thriving alumni network depends on accurate, flexible data. We’ve made it easier for schools to manage alumni and key community members, letting you focus on relationships, not spreadsheets.
Schools can now use flexible alumni profiles to track grades, years attended, and graduation years for cleaner records. The new “Community” user type allows tracking PTA, companies, and VIP contacts with similar flexibility.
New alumni forms and export options are now available to improve data management, while alumni login and self-service updates have been deployed to keep records current without manual staff updates.
Fee Management Enhancements
We’re streamlining the entire payment process — from discounts and taxes to refunds and reconciliation — to give your team greater control, reduce errors, and create a smoother family experience.
Fee Reconciliation Dashboard
The new reconciliation dashboard in OpenApply puts everything in one place, making it simple to track, edit, and manage payments with precision. Your team can now edit payments directly to fix errors quickly without waiting for back-end support, and the new refund status provides clarity around reimbursements.
Customizable invoice notifications let your team control what families see and when, while QR code payments make it easy for families to pay on the spot with no extra steps. Additionally, we’ve made the search feature smarter with filters that help schools find records quickly, even in large datasets.
Discounts and Taxes
We’ve added more flexibility to how you structure and apply your fees. Discounts and taxes can now be managed directly in OpenApply, without workarounds or manual adjustments. From managing discount types and schedules to adjusting tax rates, everything is centralized in a single settings page for convenience and consistency.
Discounts can also now be applied directly to invoices, including scheduled or time-limited promotions such as early-bird offers. Additionally, staff can add and configure taxes, such as VAT, to remain compliant and ensure full cost transparency.
These enhancements simplify billing, reduce manual work, and give families a convenient payment experience. OpenApply’s fee management aims for quicker, more reliable processes for schools and families.
Analytics 2.0 and AI Analytics Enhancements
It’s now easier to understand your admissions funnel and student lifecycle. With flexible reports, better sharing, cleaner data, and AI analytics, obtain clarity for more confident decisions.
Trend Reports
The new Trend Report gives schools a dynamic view of their application and enrollment trends over time, helping them spot changes early and respond quickly. This includes flexible date ranges that allow the tracking of daily or monthly shifts across any period, enrolled student counts that give you an accurate snapshot of your student body on any given date, and dynamic charting options that allow toggling between line, column, or table views for more straightforward presentation of insights.
Sharing Reports
We’ve made sharing and accessing reports frictionless, so your team can work from the same live data without wasting time rebuilding filters. Copy and share report links directly with colleagues or save them for quick access, save filters and configurations to ensure everyone sees the same view, and say goodbye to stale exports thanks to live, up-to-date information.
As always, security is of utmost importance, with access controls in OpenApply ensuring that only the right people see relevant reports.
Enhanced Custom Reports
We’ve overhauled how data is structured to give you more flexibility and control. This includes entity-based field grouping that makes field selection more intuitive and organized, additional fields for capturing more specific and meaningful data, direct links to student rosters for better tracking and context, and enrollment grade filters that provide finer control over reporting across grades and timelines. Meanwhile, graduation date inconsistencies have been fully resolved, ensuring cleaner data.
Date and Time Enhancements
We’ve also improved how dates and times are handled throughout analytics and rosters within OpenApply.
This includes timezone alignment so that reports always match your school’s settings, scheduled status changes which allow future-dated workflows without manual updates, and accurate status change tracking, eliminating reporting inconsistencies and confusion around enrollment and withdrawal dates.
AI Analytics Enhancements
Our AI Analyst now lets you get real answers from your data in seconds, without the need for complex filters, spreadsheets, and guesswork.
Ask questions in plain English, for example, “How many Grade 3 students enrolled in 2024?” — or — “Compare yield rates by nationality.”
Field-based filtering and grouping are now possible, to support key areas like Gender, Grade, Campus, Nationality, and Language. Meanwhile, privacy-first design ensures only non-PII data is used.
These enhancements give schools instant, accurate answers to complex questions, resulting in less time digging through data and more time acting on it. Enjoy a quicker and smarter way to surface key trends, patterns, and insights, whether you’re planning a strategy, reporting to leadership, or adjusting admissions tactics mid-season.
Other Updates
UX Enhancements
OpenApply’s new form design provides a straightforward application experience. The improved UX features include clear buttons, logical flow, and inline validation, making forms easier for families and staff, and leading to higher completion rates.
CRM Enhancements
Leverage new contact forms, pause campaigns, and ship emails directly from student profiles with OpenApply’s latest CRM enhancements. These updates are designed to further streamline communication and campaign management.
Checklist Updates
Checklists have been refined to optimize task tracking and completion in admissions workflows, allowing staff to manage application stages more efficiently.
To learn more about any of these updates and enhancements, whether you are an OppenApply user or not, book a free demo with a member of our team.