In the beginning was the Time Clock.

Even before the roll-out of the Time Clock in May of 2012, and far before the Staff Portal was built to centralize tools for employees, Jackrabbit has raised the mantra of improving productivity for staff. The Staff Portal represents that mantra which continues to mature as new technology is developed to turn new ideas into reality.

What is the Staff Portal?

The Staff Portal is a mobile friendly, secure communication system that Jackrabbit has created for your staff to take attendance, enter time and update skills without needing access to your Jackrabbit database.

The Staff Portal’s significance is defined in one of our most popular best practices articles.

A great tool for helping your entire staff to manage their time and track it accurately (and easily), the Staff Portal is also a feeder for your payroll system.

Jackrabbit understands that you wouldn’t necessarily give everyone on your staff (and everyone who needs to track their time) access to Jackrabbit. That is why this security feature is in place!

Jackrabbit also understands that staff needs centralization. Imagine the likelihood that all tasks will be completed on time if five different apps must be used to do so. Pretty low, right?

Centralization into a single app is best because:

• Their necessary tasks aren’t overlooked
• You can easily ensure privacy and security
• You can manage and monitor staff quickly and conveniently

Meet the Staff Portal in all its glory, learning its most appealing features, biggest benefits and game-changing uses. We’ve covered the ‘what’. Read on for the ‘why’, ‘how’ and even some comments from a few who are already leveraging the staff portal.    

Why use the Staff Portal?

• Use it for efficiency. Take advantage of quicker ways to take roll, track time and update skills.
• Use it for accuracy. Identify issues and accomplishments quickly and easily.
• Use it for security. Allow access to all employees – even teens and interns – without compromising your contact and financial data
• Use it for flexibility. Leverage mobile capabilities to work anywhere – pool deck, studio gym floor, front desk or home.

How is the Staff Portal used?

The Staff Portal is an awesome centralized place for your employees to do their work – and for you to monitor and manage them.

In the Staff Portal, your staff can check class schedules and manage classes, enter time (depending on your time entry method), take attendance, do skills/levels updates and send emails.

Everything is real time – so even updates made by a teammate a moment ago are visible. Owners and managers can communicate news with staff and maintain visibility into everything that employees are doing.

Taking attendance is amazing.

Jackrabbit makes everything visible when taking attendance – from grade levels and allergies to future drop dates and student photos.

Emails to individual families or entire classes can be sent, attendance history viewed and Roll Notes for students entered. The Staff Portal has been designed to take tasks that can be digitized or automated from staff so they can be family facing most of the time!

Entering time takes no time.

The time clock is an essential function of the Staff Portal and makes managing your staff’s time quick and easy.

Employees shouldn’t have to spend time telling you how many hours they’ve worked. Likewise, you shouldn’t have to spend hours translating their information into pay.

If you use Express Payroll for payments, consider the following an easy bonus. The time clock takes employee work hours to paycheck, end-to-end and works in concert with Jackrabbit to make the entire process accurate and efficient.   

What can we say about skills updates?

Parents love being in the loop. Staff love how easy it is to keep them there.

Updating skills and levels in real time via the Staff Portal simply eliminates the need for paper and the time suck of data entry after class.

Since the skills information is available:

• Why not email progress to parents?
• Why not make notes for students that help you be more in sync with their needs?
• Why not take videos of skills and upload them to Jackrabbit to use in the portal?

Yes. Yes. Yes. All done in the Staff Portal!

Send the email now!

The email feature in the Staff Portal is one of the all-time favorites of Jackrabbit users. It makes sending emails intuitive and convenient. It’s really easy to take customer service up a notch!

Whether it’s a birthday message to a student, a skills updates to a parent or information to an employee, being able to send that email at the moment you’re thinking of it is the definition of convenient! It takes away the need to ‘remember’ to do the task later!

For really serious ‘glory’ on the staff portal, Jackrabbit has an entire page of article links to the minute details of the Staff Portal in the Help Center.