Family Login Problems

There are a few problems that come up with families that cannot access their accounts. It is worth understanding these, as there are some simple ways to avoid many of them.

First off, YV uses the email address as the unique identifier for a family account. Names are not unique, and email works well, as it provides a secure way to validate an account. 

Here are a couple of possible problems:

1. Family tries to create an account but gets an error because the email is "in use". This is usually when you have already entered them as an admin. If you gave them a password, they can retrieve it with the forgotten password link (note that it takes a little while, and spam filters sometimes interfere, so if they are on the phone, you may want to go to their account and just give them a new temporary password.) 
2. If you did not give them a password (but did enter their email), they will be asked to contact you when they try to enroll, and you will need to give them one. The best policy is just to give a random password whenever you put an email in for a family.
3. Neither you nor the family can enter their email because it is "in use".  First, double check your families list. Maybe the other parent created an account under a different name etc. The definitive way to check is to use the "advanced search" link on the families list page and search for the email. If the email is not being used in your system, the family may have signed up with another educator who uses YourVirtuoso. We are going to remove this restriction so that a family can have multiple accounts with different educators, but for now there are two solutions: 1) Have the family use a different email address, or 2) If you know the other educator, and they no longer serve that family, ask them to archive the family.

A final note. These login issues sometimes result in duplicate families. There is an easy way, and a correct way, to handle this (as always). The easy way is to ensure the old account has $0 balance and archive it. This is fine moving forward, but you lose access to the family class history.

The right way is to recreate the duplicate family enrollment(s) under the old family; remove the duplicate family enrollment(s); make an adjustment to the duplicate family to get it to $0 balance and archive it; make the opposite adjustment to the old family and apply any credit to scheduled payments. This should take care of it. You may want to ask them which email address they prefer to use, and advise them what you have done of course, so they can log in to the old account which will now have all their history intact (except payment details which will by covered by the adjustment you made)