3.36.0 Release Notes

New Features

Reporting, reimagined This release brings a major upgrade to the Report Builder, with smarter filtering, flexible grouping, built-in calculations, visual dashboards, and an AI assistant to help you build reports faster.

• Visual refresh: the report run page has a cleaner, more modern look and feel.
• Advanced filtering: filter reports with field-specific operators (dates: before, after, between, on, is empty; text: contains, starts with; numbers, lookups, and booleans) for much finer control over your results.
• Relative date filters: set filters like "today − 7 days" or "start of month" that automatically roll forward each time a report runs, so scheduled subscriptions always reflect the current date window.
• Group By: collapse your report into one row per group, for example by gender then iwi, with column aggregates (sum, average, count, min, max) tailored to each field's data type.
• Calculations: apply on-the-fly arithmetic to numeric columns, such as adding GST to an invoice amount, directly within your report.
• Record links: click straight through from a report row to the underlying student, enrolment, contact, organisation, programme, intake, or class record.
• Charts and dashboard widgets: build pie, bar, line, and stacked/grouped-bar charts directly on the report edit page, preview them on demand, and pin them to your home dashboard for at-a-glance insights.
• Auto-save: changes to a report now save automatically, no more remembering to hit Save.
• Ask SELMA to build it for you: a new natural-language assistant lets you describe the report you want in plain English (e.g. "total fees by programme as a bar chart, including GST"), and it will create the columns, filters, grouping, calculations, and chart for you.

Accommodation smart pricing Accommodation pricing now supports smart price books: you can set daily, weekly and monthly rates with seasonal pricing, attach more than one price book to a room, and choose which applies to a booking. Fees are worked out across the whole stay, correctly handling changes of season and separate cost and sell tax rates. You can also record both a cost price and a sell price when setting up an accommodation pricebook, and pricebooks now save correctly so you can apply them to your rooms.

Transfers You can now record student transfers, such as airport pickups and drop-offs, in the accommodation area. A new Transfers tab, along with cards on the booking page and the student's International tab, lets you capture each transfer's provider, date and time, and sell and cost prices, and add several legs at once, ready for invoicing and paying later.

Accommodation transfers can now be priced from a Price Book. Set up a Transfer price book with a flat sell and cost price per transfer; when you add a transfer and select that product, SELMA automatically raises the student invoice (sell) and the provider bill (cost), including tax. Editing a transfer's price updates the draft documents and removing a transfer reverses them. The Student, Application and Enrolment fees tabs also gain an "Unpaid Bills" panel.

You can now bill a student's airport transfers to the transfer providers directly from the student's Transfers card. The resulting bills appear on the finance Not Yet Paid list, which now has a Fee Type column and filter so you can narrow it to transfers, and on the provider's unpaid bills, with billed transfers marked by a badge that links to the bill.

Departures needing an airport transfer The accommodation Bookings list now helps you spot students who are leaving soon and still need an airport transfer. You can filter to bookings departing within a chosen number of days, see at a glance whether a departure transfer is already booked or still needed, and book one straight from the list.

Bonds When a student leaves their accommodation early, you can now settle their bond in one step, choosing to refund it to the student, withhold part of it and bill that to the homestay provider, or both. The bond settlement is shown clearly in the exit preview, the exit summary and the bond cards.

Extra night invoices You can now add a one-off fee for extra nights of accommodation when a student arrives early or leaves late. The fee can be billed to the homestay or external accommodation provider, so early and late stays are charged correctly.

Bills and instalments The Bills section now brings payable and paid bills together in one place using tabs at the top of the page, so you can see total amounts payable, instalments still due and outstanding balances without switching between separate screens. A new instalments tab breaks a bill down into its individual instalments, and you can mark several instalments as paid at once, saving time when settling supplier payments.

Commissions as bills Agent commissions are now managed as bills alongside your other supplier payments, and commission details appear on the Fees tab of both applications and enrolments, giving you a clearer view of what is owed and what has been paid.

Fees due on the first instalment You can now present a student with a single invoice that clearly separates the costs due upfront on the first instalment, such as tuition and transfers, from the remaining accommodation instalments, making the payment plan easier to understand.

Insurance management Insurance records can now be given a status (Ordered, Active, Expired, Cancelled, or Pending) when adding or editing insurance on a student's International tab, and the status appears as a coloured badge on the insurance card. The list of statuses can be customised under Settings → Lookup Data → Insurance Status (Expired and Cancelled are system-managed and cannot be changed, as SELMA uses them automatically). Insurance Type can now have custom values added too.

The Student Index gains five optional columns showing each student's most recent insurance: Insurance Type, Insurance Status, Insurance Provider, Policy Start and Policy End. Administrators can enable them per role via the Column Manager. The type and status link straight to the student's International tab, and the provider links to the organisation record. Insurance Status and Insurance columns are also available on the Application Index.

SELMA now also expires insurance automatically: each night, policies whose end date has passed are set to Expired (manually cancelled policies and custom statuses are left alone). Available on accounts with the International tab enabled.

Multiple Public Trust accounts You can now set up and manage more than one Public Trust account. Each account is mapped to an internal organisation, and one account is marked as the default; when you send from an Application or Enrolment, the correct account is resolved automatically from the programme's organisation, falling back to the default where there is no specific mapping. Customers with a single account are unaffected.

Xero GL mapping at account level Fee Types can now be mapped to Xero GL accounts once, at an account level, on a redesigned Xero admin screen. When an invoice is built, each line's Fee Type carries its GL account automatically, so staff no longer choose a GL account for every line. The Xero integration page also lets you choose which fields build the Customer Name sent to Xero (for example, Student ID), and whether the SELMA invoice number should drive the Xero invoice number rather than being placed in the reference field.

Mail-merge fields on fee items Fee item descriptions on a price book can now include mail-merge fields. When setting up an enrolment price book, use the field picker on a fee line description to insert dynamic details such as programme name, intake dates, student information, enrolment details, or the component a fee relates to, mixed with your own text. When the price book is applied to a student's enrolment, those fields are automatically filled with the student's real details on the resulting invoice, so fee lines show the right contextual information without editing each one by hand. Existing price books are unchanged: a fee item with no description set still shows its label as before.

Bulk application actions Applications can now be converted to enrolments in bulk from the Application index, and a bulk "Update Step" action has been added to the intake Applications tab and the Application index.

Enrolment PDFs in the Student Portal Students can now download their enrolment documents, such as transcripts, directly from each enrolment in the Student Portal.

The feature is off by default. To enable it, go to Portal Admin and switch on Enrolment PDF Downloads. A separate Student Portal Reports setting controls which documents students are able to download. If nothing is selected there, students see whatever their programme already allows.

Documents that require a completed enrolment stay unavailable until the enrolment is complete, and students are told why.

Marking Student Portal submissions Teachers can now review student portal submissions directly from the Marking screen. Teachers with view and grading access can open a submission to mark it and view its attached documents; previously this required full edit access to the enrolment. A new optional Documents column shows which submissions have files attached and opens them in place. The Marking screen now lists only the enrolments assigned to the teacher.

Events timeline paging and search The Events timeline now loads in pages as you scroll, so students and other records with a large event history open quickly instead of timing out. A search box and an event-type filter have been added to the timeline, available on both the staff and portal views.

Workflows: send email from an invoice Workflows can now send an email from an invoice. When building a workflow that is triggered by an invoice, the Send Email action is now available, so you can automatically email the student or the agent linked to the invoice. For example, a provider can set up a reminder that emails the student or agent when an invoice becomes overdue and has not been paid, with no manual chasing.

Send application emails to stakeholders You can now send application emails directly to a student's stakeholders. On the Application Send Email screen the To field lists the student along with any organisations and contacts assigned to that student as stakeholders, each labelled by type (Student, Contact, Organisation) so you can tell them apart. This removes the need to copy and paste agent or employer addresses by hand. Whoever the email is sent to, it is still recorded against the student's profile so the full history of application correspondence stays on the student's record.

Intake, programme and campus fields on student templates Student communication templates can now include intake, programme and campus mail merge fields, which fill in from the intake and programme the student has registered interest in. This lets you send documents like offers of place directly from a student's profile, without needing an enrolment first. If a student has no interested-in intake or programme recorded, those fields are left as-is for the sender to fill in before sending.

Children Finished completion rule A new completion rule condition, Children Finished, is now available when building a rule on a programme component. It is satisfied once every child component has reached a final outcome, whether the student passed or failed.

The existing Children Complete condition is unchanged and still requires every child to have an outcome that counts towards completion. Providers who want a parent's grade to roll up even when a child was failed need to edit the rule and switch it to the new condition.

SELMA Forms: custom start date and calculated end date SELMA Forms now support a custom start date paired with a duration field, configurable admin-side, with the option of days, weeks or months and a minimum and maximum constraint. Available on Enrolment, Application and Contact forms. When this field is added, the enrolment or application is created with the dates chosen, as opposed to using the intake start and end date.

Contact form: applications and pending enrolments Applications can now be created through the contact form, and enrolments can be created as pending through the contact form.

Organisation documents Organisations now support attaching documents, displayed on their own Documents tab, in the same way as students.

Release notes in SELMA A new Release Notes page in SELMA shows what has changed in the version you are running.

Enhancements

Accommodation bookings: accommodation bookings now start on a new "New" status, shown first in the status list. New bookings are created on whichever status is set as the default, so you can choose the starting status; staff then move a booking to "Pending" once the accommodation provider has been emailed. You can now search for a provider in the Matching Rooms section when making a booking; searching for a provider shows all of their available rooms, making it quicker to find the right one.

Accommodation dates: the end-date calculator is now available when creating an accommodation booking: enter a duration (days, weeks or months) and the check-out date is worked out for you. Calculated end dates now land on the same weekday as the start date when no anchor day is configured (for example a Monday start gives a Monday end) across enrolment, application and accommodation. Accommodation end dates can now be anchored to their own day, set independently of the enrolment's anchor day, so accommodation billing cycles no longer have to follow the study schedule.

Accommodation indexes: searches can now be saved on each of the accommodation indexes. The Campus/City filter on the Accommodation Booking Index is now labelled Location, to be more accurate to what is being filtered. The Accommodation Criteria Types settings page has been tidied up so it displays correctly in dark mode.

Accommodation templates: accommodation mail merge fields are now available for customers with accommodation features enabled.

Student ID columns: you can now add the Student ID as a column through the Column Manager on more listing pages, including the Accommodation and Finance indexes and the Application index, making it easier to identify students at a glance.

Application index: Campus has been added as an advanced search filter on the Application index, filtering by the intake's campus.

Intake index: Programme Code is now searchable on the intake index.

Applications: application step configuration has a new gate mode, so you can specify when a step is validated: before, after, or without validation. Custom field inheritance is now supported for applications.

Fees and tax: the Add Fee form now shows a live Total Amount, so you can see exactly what a fee will come to as you enter it. The total updates as you change the amount, quantity or tax, and reflects whether tax is included in the amount or added on top. It appears the same way when editing an existing fee. Tax rates can now be configured and shown against fees: set the rate value directly when adding or editing a tax rate in the lookup; choose a tax rate on price book fee lines, with a Manual option for a custom tax amount; and see the tax rate on the price book list, the Fees Not Yet Invoiced views, and when applying a price book. Applying a price book to an enrolment or application now shows the correct line totals.

Communication templates: the enrolment fees table merge field now includes invoice fees.

UIP report: the UIP report now includes application-based fees in a learner's course tuition (used when the enrolment has no fees of its own).

Class enrolments: a filter shows current class enrolments only, based on their valid dates, on the Enrolments and Grading screens, and your choice between "current only" and "all" is saved as a preference. Closed and Full intakes now appear on the "link enrolments to class" panel, and enrolments that are withdrawn, early withdrawn, cancelled, deferred or withdrawn special can no longer be linked. Locked system users no longer appear in the "link to class" dropdown and cannot be linked.

Contact form: when a new organisation is created via the contact step, it is now set to a new "Pending" organisation type. Accommodation preference rule handling has been fine-tuned, and the section is now always shown rather than opened by a button.

SELMA Forms: year-type fields now require a year between 1900 and one year ahead of the current year.

Custom fields: dropdown custom field options can now be set inactive.

Student Portal submissions: portal submissions now show the component description, and students are given a clear reason when an upload is blocked (for example, when the submission date has passed) instead of a generic error.

Performance: marking and grading are now noticeably faster. On larger sites the marking screen and the grading-scheme list could be slow to open, and adding a grade could take several seconds. Selecting a grader, listing grading schemes, and saving grades now respond much more quickly, so tutors spend less time waiting while marking.

Bug Fixes

Invoicing: GST/tax is no longer miscalculated on some invoices. Where an inclusive tax rate (for example, Incl GST 15%) was selected, the tax could be worked out using the wrong rate; invoices now apply the correct tax rate, so the tax amount on each fee and the invoice total are accurate. Invoice creation no longer fails when an organisation or contact is the payer. Editing a fee line on a consolidated invoice (one built from fees across several applications) no longer reassigns that line to the wrong application, so invoice PDFs and reporting continue to trace every fee back to the application it came from. Editing a fee line on a student no longer unsets its relationship. The single invoice wizard no longer generates instalments when the cadence is set to pay in full. Quotes can be created again. When sending an email from an invoice, the attachments list no longer pre-selects every system template; only the object's active default report is pre-selected.

Commissions and bills: deleting an invoice now safely handles any commission bill it raised. A commission bill that is still in draft is removed along with the invoice. Once a commission bill has been approved (or paid), the invoice can no longer be deleted; make any correction with a credit note or refund on the bill rather than by deleting the invoice. Commission bills whose invoice was previously deleted now open correctly instead of showing an error. Bill line tax amounts now display consistently with invoice lines, showing whether tax is included in the total. The tax rate chosen when recording an agent commission is now saved with the commission, and the commission form automatically calculates the tax amount from the selected rate.

Xero and Public Trust: invoices sent to Xero, and student fees submitted to Public Trust, now include the line quantity and correctly honour tax-inclusive pricing. Previously the quantity was ignored and tax-inclusive amounts were reduced (for example a $500 line appeared as $434.78 in Xero), so the exported figures could differ from the SELMA invoice. Both integrations now use the same amounts as the SELMA invoice: correct quantity, full tax-inclusive price, and tax matching SELMA. A paid SELMA invoice synced to Xero no longer changes status to "invoiced".

Accommodation: when a student exits their accommodation early, only the unpaid instalments due after the exit date are now cancelled. Instalments that have already been paid, or that fall before the exit date, are left untouched, and the exit form no longer produces an error when it is submitted without an exit date. You no longer need to refresh the page before generating an invoice for booking fees; the Generate Invoice button now works as soon as the fees have been confirmed. Several fixes to smart price books: the tax-inclusive option and cost tax rate now appear on transfer and accommodation price books; seasonal rates now allow a cost price, GST setting and fee type; cloning an accommodation price book keeps its smart-pricing settings; and fee lines now display correctly when creating a single invoice. Logged-out and new students can now view accommodation preferences on forms.

Application list: the Application list no longer fails to load when a column is switched off in Column Manager. Previously, hiding any column left the list showing a loading error and no records until the column was switched back on. Sorting the Application list by the Student column now works. Column headings on the Application list now follow the columns chosen in Column Manager, so hidden columns no longer leave a heading behind or push data out of line.

Applications: a new application is now always created on the initial step. The Application Form Submission tab now reflects checkbox states correctly, and contact form application submissions no longer show "something went wrong" on that tab.

Contact form: when a student is given the same email address as the primary contact, the form now stops and explains why, so the details can be corrected before submitting. Previously the submission failed with an error page and created a new contact record on every attempt. A submission that fails part-way through now reuses the contact and submission already created when it is retried, instead of duplicating them. Fields shown by a form rule, including dates and dropdowns, are now always ready to use rather than appearing greyed out. Various fixes and enhancements to contact form rules.

Form PDFs: on the contact form, the contact step information is now added at the top of the student's PDF, the form name has been added to the top of all PDFs generated by a form submission, and multi-select values and checkboxes now show their submitted state. Long custom field answers on SELMA Forms are no longer truncated on the PDF.

Templates: SMS messages and PDF templates now only fill in the mail merge fields available for that communication template type. Previously, an email-only placeholder (such as an email signature or a fees table) typed into an SMS would be replaced; it is now left as-is, since those fields are not intended for text messages.

WordPress plugin: the WordPress course listing and its preview no longer come back completely empty when an intake, programme or campus has a dropdown custom field that has not been answered, which is the state every newly created intake starts in. An unanswered dropdown is now shown as blank rather than stopping the listing. If a single course cannot be built for any other reason, only that course is left out and the rest of the listing still displays.

AVETMISS: students whose country of birth is United Kingdom are now reported to NCVER with SACC code 2100 instead of England's 2102, so they are no longer submitted as born in England. The United Kingdom entry in the AVETMISS country lookup is also now active and selectable. Existing students are updated automatically, no action needed.

Users: updating a user's name or preferred name now updates the display name shown around the system, so the name you see always reflects the latest changes.

Qualifications: fixed a small grammatical error on the Qualification page.

Updates in 3.36.1 to 3.36.7

Contact form (3.36.1): the student section of the Contact Form is no longer pre-filled when the person logging in exists as both a contact and a linked student. The contact form now stays independent of the student record.

Accommodation templates (3.36.1): accommodation templates are now available in the Send Email panel for the primary contact and accommodation provider on a booking page.

Public Trust (3.36.1): Public Trust submissions are no longer rejected when a student's citizenship, name or programme title contains a comma (for example "China, People's Republic of"). SELMA now removes commas, quotes and line breaks from the values it sends, because Public Trust's importer does not support quoted CSV fields. Enrolments that bounced for this reason can be reversed and submitted again.

Workflow Builder (3.36.1): workflow email steps now send to their CC recipients when the step is addressed to a system user. Previously the CC list was dropped on those sends, so only the primary recipient received the email. System users CC'd on a workflow email are now sent to the email address on their contact record, matching where the same user would be emailed as the primary recipient. Previously the CC went to their SELMA login address, which may be a different mailbox.

SELMA Forms: Latin characters only (3.36.5): form builders can now require applicants to enter text in Latin (English) characters only.

• Where: Forms → edit a form → Config → tick Restrict Text to Latin Characters. It's available on every form type, including application forms, contact forms and training agreement forms.
• What applicants see: if they type characters from a non-Latin script, such as Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic or Greek, the field is highlighted with a message. They can't move to the next page or submit until it's corrected.
• Still allowed: accented letters and macrons (é, ñ, ā, ō), apostrophes, dashes, numbers and standard punctuation.
• The setting applies to countersigners on the same form, and it applies to submissions resumed from Save and Continue.
• It's off by default, so existing forms are unchanged until a provider turns it on.

On contact forms, a value an applicant typed into a field that a form rule later hides is no longer saved with the submission. This matches how application forms already behave.