Question
Three of my classrooms need to be based on age. The others need to be based on birthday with a September 1st cut off date like the public schools. Why won’t WaitlistPlus let me do this? How should I setup my lists for this situation
Answer
The reason why we don’t allow this is because you have people who could be on more than one list, or fall between the lists. For example.
Assumptions
- Your lists
- Toddler – Age 0-24 Months
- PreK – Birthday 1/1/2018 – 1/1/2020
- Today is 6/1/2020
The problem with this setup is that if today is 6/1/2020 and a person has a birthdate of 12/1/2019 (7 months old), they would fall under both lists. Since we automatically assign and move people for age/birthdate lists, we wouldn’t know which one to put them on.
If you consider the future and move today up to 6/1/2022, and have a person with a birthdate of 3/1/2020, they will not fall on any list. They will be 27 months old, and have a birthdate that falls outside the PreK range.
Possible Solution
- Change the List Placement of your Birthdate lists to Manual. For reference, you can add the date range into the List name.
- Create an extra age-based list with an age range that roughly fits the birthdays you had in your birthdate lists. This will be used as a “holding area” to put kids who need to be assigned to one of your Manual lists.
When you add a new person, you can choose one of the manual lists based on their birthdate. For the customer signup forms, just provide the “Link for auto placement lists (Age or Birthdate)”. When a customer signs up with an age within that rough birthdate range, they’ll be placed into the “holding area” list. You can review that list from time to time and move people from it to the appropriate manual list based on their birthdate.
Your lists may look something like this:
