Update for Classic Friends

We strongly encourage you to develop a migration plan for your program as soon as possible. A key part of the planning will be to schedule a timeframe for your migration, ideally before the end of this school year. Pre-scheduling your migration enables us to prepare your new CutTime account creation and better tailored assistance for your setup in our system.

Yes, you will need to export your program’s data from your ‘Classic’ CutTime account, then import your program data and set up your account in the NEW CutTime. We’ve prepared a checklist with links to guides and other resources. Even better - our self-import tool wizardry will help facilitate the transfer of your student, guardian, instrument, and attire inventory data and speed up the overall migration process. See our Help Articles and Videos in the Online Help Center for more details. (Links included in the Classic Migration Checklist!)

Yes, we are confident that CutTime will achieve parity with the core features of ‘Classic’ CutTime this year. Functionality with instruments, attire/uniform, and music library inventories, along with communications, financial, and the End of Year process that is simpler for the Classic community will be in place. Good news! The Attire Inventory, Music Library and Documents with eSignature features are available and the End of Year workflow will be coming very soon.

Some items will not be merged with the new CutTime. Among them is a formal ‘general ledger’ accounting system. After speaking with hundreds of customers about their priorities and core requirements, we took a strategic decision to keep our focus on supporting programs with super simple to read account balance statements with costs, payments, and credits that are exportable for further manipulation in other third-party accounting platforms. We’ve implemented wonderful time savers like automated account balance payment reminders and cost sharing donation requests, which have been extremely successful and well received.

Great news for your members - they will no longer have to deal with a user id and password to access their program information in the new CutTime! Our Magic Link approach for keeping them connected and up to date has brought thousands of smiles to Students, Guardians, Teachers, and Booster Leaders alike :)

We will communicate more about the merger status of specific ‘Classic’ features as part of the upcoming migration communications. Be on the lookout for these emails as the semester progresses.

58% of people say that texting is the most effective way for businesses and organizations to reach them. 74% of people respond to text messages from a business within an hour. In our CutTime community, we see a 95% open and read rate for text messages within 24 hours vs. only a 25% open only rate for email in the same time period. Simply put - email is old school and difficult for busy parents and guardians to keep up and respond. Isn’t everyone’s inbox overflowing these days?

That’s why we came up with a more modern solution that focuses primarily on SMS text messaging. We use SMS text as a web-based push notification to get your messages center stage on your members’ devices. Now instead of having to send a personal text message reminding a member to read your emails - they can just tap and go straight to your message! A huge time saver and life saver when you have an urgent item to communicate. A good example of this is when you are coming back from an away game or performance and run into unexpected traffic delay. Being able to send a quick announcement in that moment to guardians that the pick up time will be thirty minutes later is priceless. Your guardians getting that time sensitive notification on their phone where they are more likely to see it is gold. Best of all, we enable you to see the ‘deliverability’ of your messages and alert you to issues where someone has changed their mobile phone number or accidentally ‘opted out’ from texts. Trust us, you and your members will love the convenience of our SMS text approach.

For cases where a student is not able to provide a mobile phone number for SMS messaging or the message fails to reach a student or guardian, CutTime will automatically re-send the Magic Link notification to the email address on file for that person. Email is also available as a primary method for sending Magic Link notifications to students if needed. If your students or guardians do not wish to receive text messages from CutTime, they can reply ‘STOP’ anytime to opt out and 'UNSTOP' to opt back in. View our SMS Terms of Service here.

We understand that timing for your migration may need to be adjusted. Just send us an email to support@gocuttime.com with the details of your schedule changes and we’ll work to accommodate your timing needs.

Customers will have 45 calendar days to export / download all of their program data from their ‘Classic’ account, before it is set into ‘read-only’ mode for the remainder of system operations until the shut down on Friday, August 30, 2024.

No worries, if you find that you need to request an extension to complete the migration, just let us know. In our experience, most programs complete this process well before the 45-day mark. But, we understand there could be extenuating circumstances where a little extra time to clean up your inventory data is needed before beginning those imports into the next generation of CutTime. In those cases, you would proceed with getting your students, guardians, ensembles (groups) in place so your programs can start utilizing the communications and financial tools straight away while the inventory side of the data migration is completed.

Your member and inventory data remains active and secure throughout the transition period. When migrating to the next generation of CutTime, you will have 45 calendar days to make any changes to the program data in your ‘Classic’ account. After that point, you will retain read-only access and export capabilities for your data in the 'Classic' version of our system in case you need to retrieve a piece of information, but not editing abilities. Our team will work closely with you to ensure a seamless transition as possible, preserving the integrity and security of your records. Once the data transfer is validated and your new accounts are activated, your former 'Classic' account will be available only in 'read-only' mode until August 30, 2024, after which the old historical data will be permanently removed from our servers. This important last step protects the data integrity of your district and school information from being exposed to malicious hacking and other potential security threats.

As part of the migration process, we’ll set up a new CutTime account for your program and provide you with tutorials and other resources so you can hit the ground running quickly.

In our experience, we’ve found running your program on two different platforms is highly problematic for several reasons. Data integrity is a huge challenge when you have people trying to maintain information in two places. Program members and helpers quickly become confused on which system is being used for what purpose, which leads to confusion and frustration. Lastly, having data in multiple platforms increases the potential exposure to cybercrime threats. All this to say, we advise limiting the simultaneous operation of ‘Classic’ and ‘Next Gen’ systems to only what is necessary to complete the data transition. Anything exceeding beyond this guideline, will need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Actually, we’ve found that participating in the migration process is the BEST form of training. We’ve seen our customers become much more familiarized, comfortable, and confident with using CutTime by being active participants throughout their own migration journey. By allowing you and your team to be hands-on with setting up your own program’s data, it will be a much more realistic and rewarding learning experience for everyone. Additionally, if you have multiple programs, we recommend you appoint a ‘CutTime Champion’ to help guide and evangelize. We will work with you to help your Champion get up to speed quickly and stay well informed of the latest and greatest enhancements with the CutTime product. We’ve found this combined approach greatly accelerates the overall user learning curve and makes for ‘stickier’ ongoing knowledge retention by each individual after the migration is completed.

Our Online Help Center here is filled with help articles and tutorial videos. You can also ping us via online chat with quick questions or if you get stuck, we can schedule a quick phone/video consultation to help you navigate any issues.

If you need updated paperwork from us, please send your request to support@gocuttime.com.