As we settle into the new year, the SchoolsBuddy team is thrilled to have hit the ground running.
We’ve made a number of updates designed to deliver an increasingly frictionless school-to-home experience. This month, we are especially excited to unveil a major integration that unifies extracurricular activities and school transport in one seamless ecosystem.
Introducing Our Vectare Transport Integration
A key milestone in January was our integration with Vectare, a leader in school transport solutions that Faria Education Group acquired last year. This strategic partnership gives schools, parents, and staff a single, unified view of the full school day. Bus routes and schedules automatically sync into the SchoolsBuddy calendar, combining extracurricular activities and transport in one seamless experience.
Vectare remains the operational source of truth for transport management and registration, while SchoolsBuddy is reinforced as a central hub for transparent, real-time scheduling across the whole school community.
The integration offers more than just visibility — it enables a convenient Single Sign-On (SSO) experience. Now, staff and parents can move between SchoolsBuddy and Vectare without re-entering credentials. This makes the switch between activity booking and transport management quick and easy. We have embedded direct links to Vectare across the user journey, giving parents click-through options on booking pages, allocation emails, and calendars.
With a single click, staff can access passenger lists and live journey tracking, while parents can directly navigate from SchoolsBuddy to their personal Vectare transport calendar, giving them a complete, up-to-date view of their child’s school transport.
SchoolsBuddy view
Vectare view
Mobile App and User Experience Refinements
The latest SchoolsBuddy mobile app update enhances the parent and student experience by providing smarter alignment with system settings.
The homepage now respects fee visibility preferences, hiding balances for families when needed while ensuring full consistency between web and mobile platforms. Your school can confidently deliver a polished, unified interface that families trust on the go.
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Platform Enhancements and Operational Improvements
We are continuing to strengthen the platform’s core infrastructure. This month, we introduced several back-end improvements to enhance daily operations.
- Seamless Attendance Tracking: Staff can now take attendance effortlessly within Registers and Events, even when activity groups are streamlined, ensuring student participation is always accurately recorded.
- Strengthened Security and Deployment: We have integrated ScheduledSQL solutions with GitHub App to provide technical teams with even greater security and deployment reliability.
- Optimized Salesforce Workflows: Schools using Salesforce will benefit from smoother onboarding and enhanced provisioning performance within Stage environments.
- Intuitive Group Management: Refined group saving in the Reception module delivers a more reliable, user-friendly experience that aligns with our latest interface updates.
- Accelerated Financial Workflows: Tuition fee invoice generation is now faster and more dependable, allowing your finance team to keep workflows moving without delay.
- Modernized Event Management: We have retired the legacy Organising module, replacing it with our enhanced Sports, Trips, and ‘Other Events’ tools, enabling more efficient scheduling, flexible custom event creation, and centralized planning and tracking in one place.
To learn more about any of these features, whether you are a SchoolsBuddy user or not, book a free demo with a member of our team.