Our development guys put in extra hours Friday night and released some new features. In addition to a round of minor interface tweaks, bugfixes, and some way-behind-the-scenes optimization, here's what's new:

Navigation: Billing was just going to get too cluttered. So we updated Populi's overall navigation and broke out the College Management and Financial functions into what we're calling "apps". It's the same basic idea as before, but this way we can further enhance our Financial features without stuffing the screen too full of links and buttons.

So, what was once the Billing tab is now the Financial app, and within Financial you'll find tabs for Billing, Accounting, and Financial Aid. With the new tabs, we've re-jiggered the organization of the various views so that they appear only within the proper tab.

Also, as you can see, you no longer click your "logged in as" name to get to your profile—you'll just click the more intuitive My Profile link to get there.

Payment Plans: Now you can create payment plans with unique payment schedules and apply them to individual students or invoices.

Deposits: We've built in a new workflow that lets you create, accept, and apply tuition deposits.

Degree Audits: Now you can require a certain GPA of individual course groups, as well as add exceptions for individual students.

Even Better Passwords: Want to make your password even stronger? Now you can use special characters—!@#$%^&*()+, etc.—in addition to upper- and lower-case letters and numbers.

Behind-the-scenes Optimization: "Optimization" means that we've improved some of the background processes that power many common tasks in Populi.

A full accounting of our new features and other improvements that went up with this release are available for our users in the Populi help system (just click help up by the search bar and you'll go straight there).