What is a student record?

4 min read

A student record is the single most important record in Dancebase, almost everything else, bookings, payments, attendance, check-ins, hangs off one of these. The good news is it's genuinely simple once you see the shape of it.

How a student actually logs in

Students don't have an admin-style account, but they do have a real username and password, not a shared code. Their username is built from their own name ("Joe Jones" becomes Joe Jones, with a number appended only if that exact name's already taken, "Joe Jones 2"), and their password is one they choose themselves at signup. That pair is used for everything on their side: logging in, booking a class, cancelling, and tapping in at the kiosk.

A student added directly by an admin doesn't get a login at all, until they need one

Adding a student yourself, from a family's own page, creates the record but doesn't issue a username or password, there's nothing for them to lose or forget. If they ever need to log in themselves, that happens the normal way, through their own signup or the family portal.

A real student record, expanded. Every field a student's own record can hold, in one place.

A student can exist before they ever pay for anything

1
A pay-per-class tier gets a record on sign-up, before any payment. This is deliberate, a pay-per-class student still needs somewhere real to hold their details for liability and a smoother return visit, even on a day they don't end up paying for a class.
2
Buying a real membership later upgrades that same record. Nobody ends up with two separate records for the same person just because they started pay-per-class and later committed to a recurring membership.
3
A student can hold more than one tier at once, when your own studio's tier rules allow it, a student can genuinely hold two memberships on the same record at the same time.

What's actually on a student's profile

Straight from the Students page's own built-in explanation.

Name, date of birth, email (their real identity anchor, distinct from the code), sex assigned at birth, and status (active/inactive).
Their current tier(s), whichever ones your studio runs, a student can hold more than one at once.
A medical note and an emergency contact name/phone, if they've provided one. These two fields are genuinely sensitive, they're encrypted at rest in the database and every admin view of them is quietly logged, this isn't casual data.
A photo, if the family (or the student themself, for an adult student on their own record) has added one.

Quick answers

What happens if a student forgets their password?

They can reset it themselves from the sign-in screen, a temporary password gets emailed straight to them, no need for you to look anything up or reset it on their behalf.

Can two different students end up with the same username?

No, if their name's already taken, a number gets appended automatically, "Joe Jones", then "Joe Jones 2", and so on, so it's always unique without you ever having to think about it.

Why can't I just edit the emergency contact fields directly like every other field?

You can edit them the same way as anything else, they're just stored encrypted and access is logged behind the scenes for you, nothing changes about how you use the form itself.

Is a student's tier the same thing as their family's tier?

No, tier lives on the individual student, not the family. Two siblings in the same family can genuinely be on different tiers, entirely independently.