Your data is yours. We really mean it.

Let's say you want to stop using Populi and you need your data imported into another system. Populi lets you download your core data once every 24 hours from Account > Backups. The backup file includes:

• Academics—everything from transcripts to transfer credits, from course lessons to the course catalog
• Financial transactions—invoices, payments, financial aid, and donations
• Admissions applications and all the information you have for your leads
• All the people in your system together with all their contact and other personal info
• Your entire Bookstore and Library

Here's how you (well, your school's account administrator) can get your data out of Populi:

1. Go to Account > Backups

After logging in, click Account and then go to Backups. If it has been more than 24 hours since your school last retrieved this file, you can click Request a Backup.

2. Confirm

Before creating the backup file, Populi asks you to confirm that you want to do this. Remember: this file contains a bunch of sensitive data—academic records, financial information, Social Security numbers, and a lot more! You'll want to take special care with this file, and this confirmation is one part of that.

3. Wait and download

The backup file can be pretty big and so it may take a little while to generate it (up to several hours). The moment the file is complete, Populi sends you an email. Once you receive the email, go to Account > Backups and download the file.

(You can also use the API to download data backups—see the API documentation for details)...

And that's it! The backup file with all your Populi data is in your hands, no strings attached. You can keep your own secure backups (in addition to ours) or load it into your school's new system... or whatever else you might need.

We’ve worked with a lot of schools that needed to get their legacy data from their old system. Many software companies really made them work for it. Some didn’t provide backups in the first place—they had to improvise a way to extract the data from their system. Others provided data that was missing crucial items (transfer credits, anything entered before 1996, you name it). Some had “business” in mind and charged schools to retrieve their data. One avaricious outfit compels their schools to sign another year-long contract!

Lock-in tactics range from the lazy to the vile. Our business plan—no long-term contracts, month-to-month billing, customers can cancel any time—means we have to win back all our customers every month. Free, no-strings-attached, comprehensive data backups mean we’ve made it easy to leave, and that we’ve got work to do if we want you to stay.

Update (June 8, 2016)

We’ve been asked about how the backups you can download relate to the regular data backups we already perform. Here’s the low-down:

• There are two kinds of backups: Customer-requested, which are what is described above; and our Regular backups, which we automatically perform on an ongoing basis.
• Regular backups are securely stored in a separate location and are meant to restore your data in case of emergency and provide historical data “snapshots” for various uses. Customer-requested backups are meant for your own needs and uses.
• We perform these backups as follows: Hourly backups for 36 hours, daily for two weeks, weekly for 30 weeks, and monthly for 10 years. Each backup is a complete copy of everything in your Populi database; there are up to 200 backups per customer. See Update below for the changes we made to comply with GDPR.
• Think of it like an actively-curated photo album: At any given moment, this photo album contains 36 pictures of the last two days, 14 of the last two weeks, 30 of the last 30 weeks, and 120 of the last ten years. As time moves on, a portion of your older snapshots are deleted, but new ones are always being added.
• We keep your data around as long as you’re a customer; if you cancel your use of Populi, we delete your archived data after 90 days.

Update (February 4, 2019)

This post describes the updates we made to comply with the European Union's GDPR. In light of those changes, here's how we now handle Regular backups:

• Hourly backups are performed for 36 hours, daily for two weeks, and weekly for 26 weeks.
• All backup data is hard-deleted after 26 weeks; it takes an additional 26 weeks to fully purge all old backup data.
• GDPR allows Populi to retain data connected to academic or financial information for various purposes (complying with an audit or subpoena, for example). Such data is never hard-deleted.

You can now link people to donations using a soft credit. A soft credit lets you acknowledge someone for a donation besides the actual donor. For example, a wealthy tycoon donates $50,000 to your scholarship fund and you want to make sure that when you thank him, his wife is included in the acknowledgement. Or a donation comes in from a local corporation thanks to the efforts of a graduate who now works there—you can now give her the soft credit for the donation. Soft credits are awarded on a donation page right below where you link the donation with the donor. The Donors report and its communication actions have been updated to respect soft credits as well.

This was one of our customers' top requests for Populi Donations, and we're very pleased to get this out to everyone.

Populi Bookstore has a bunch of great new features this morning. As part of a general rewrite, we gave Bookstore improved return/refund processing, discount codes, and better inventory management (plus lots of interface improvements and upgrades). Here's  a look at the new stuff:

Returns and refunds

Bookstore now makes it easy to process returned items and refunds (let's be honest: it was not easy before). Returns are handled in Point of Sale: just click Return Items, scan or search for the items to return, and connect the returns to the original order. You can handle the entire refund right there, too: just pick your refund method from the drop-down (you can even refund to a student account) or use the refund to reduce the amount of a new purchase. Bookstore now also handles credit card refunds—it contacts your processor and reverses the charge without you having to do anything.

Discount codes

Discount codes let you offer your customers price breaks on items and shipping costs. You can specify a dollar or percent discount, whether the code applies only to certain items or customer types, minimum order amount, expiration dates, and more. Codes can be applied by customers at the online checkout or by you at Point of Sale. So now you can offer, say, free shipping on all online orders over $50, or give faculty and staff a 10% employee discount on books and apparel.

Inventory improvements

Bookstore now features a number of improvements to inventory management.

• Each item segment now has better inventory tracking. Inventory batches let you record when you received a new shipment and the cost-per-item. Adjustments let you correct inventory for things like loss/damage or clerical errors. Each sale and return is also figured in so you know for sure what's in stock.
• The new Inventory tool in Admin lets you add inventory batches for any item, while the Returned Items report lets you manage which returned items go back to your stock and which are counted as shrinkage.
• On the accounting side, new settings let you specify your inventory cost flow method (FIFO or LIFO) as well as accounts for purchases, shrinkage, and COGS.
• Of course, all those lovely reports have been updated to take all the new data into account.

We're really happy to get these Bookstore improvements out to our customers. They give you more control over your inventory, make everyday tasks easier for your Bookstore staff (and your school's accountant), and let you offer even more to your customers.

For more details, have a look at the Populi Knowledge Base.

Also new in Populi: Library Shelf View. Shelf view shows you what's in the physical vicinity of the resource you're currently looking at. Just scroll to the bottom of any resource page and there you'll see it; click the left/right arrows to wander your way through the library shelves. The view is ordered by call number and makes it easy to discover resources you might not have thought to search for.

There are a lot of new buttons and links in Populi today, and just about all of them say... Text.

Texting is now almost as common in Populi as email. Formerly, it handled emergency notifications and password retrieval for staff and faculty (of course, it still does that!). Now, it does a lot more. Need to tell a prof's students that he's out sick and class is canceled? Text his students right from the course roster. Wanna send a quick thank you to your $100-$250 donors? Use the Text donors button in the Donations report. Have an accepted applicant you want to tell the good news? Now you can send her a text right from the accept application dialog.

The new features give your admissions staff swifter ways to communicate with leads. When an inquiry or applicant fills out the initial form, they can verify their mobile/text number on the spot. You can then respond to their questions via text, and they can reply in turn. And when you accept an applicant, you can import her verified number right into her profile.

We want to make communication at your school as friction-free as possible, and we're really pleased to give you these new texting features. If you'd like to get your Populi user account set up to receive text notifications from your school, read this article. And if you want to keep an eye on how many texts your school has sent so far this month, have a look at Communications > Campus Notifications (remember that additional texts are 2¢ each).

We recently released a couple new academic reporting tools.

Attendance report

The new Attendance report in Academics > Reporting lets you look at every detail of every attendance record at your school. You can look at attendance by student, by course, by term, and even get a report of all your attendance data—every term, every course, every meeting, every student. Use the spiffy new reporting filter to narrow down your searches and then export anything you find to XLS or CSV.

Several of our users have asked for more detailed attendance reporting, and we're pleased to make this available.

Test question analysis

The new Analysis view in tests shows you the big picture of how your students are faring against your online test questions. The data helps you evaluate whether your test questions are enough of a challenge—or too much of a cakewalk—for your students. It can also help you pinpoint your students' strengths and struggles in a way that overall assignment grades can't.

For example, your students average 75% on the mid-term exam. Test analysis reveals to you that they bombed the short answers from one particular textbook (but otherwise did just fine), and that's what dragged everyone's grades down. So now you know that you either need to spend more time reviewing that text or ditch those questions when it comes time for the final exam.