Problem with "cancellation pending"
Cancellation pending can be a problem for leaders when they are trying to cancel people off and add people from the waitlist right before the course. The people in "cancellation pending" count towards the number of registered students, which means that their spots can't be offered to anyone else until Member Services reviews their status and issues the refund, etc. Member Services then changes the status to "cancelled" which then frees up that spot for someone else. But the problem is that this lag in between "cancelled" and "cancellation pending" can sometimes take days and prevents leaders from being able to manage the roster for the waitlisters. There is currently no good workaround. Perhaps the solution is to not let "cancellation pending" count towards the registered total?
I am sorry to hear you’ve experienced a lag time on cancellations. Unfortunately we need the cancellation pending status to process refunds. Member Services does cancellations every business day so if you are seeing a lag time of more than one business day on a course roster that is time sensitive please email info@mountaineers.org or give us a ring at 206-521-6001 so we can update immediately. Additionally if the course is shortly approaching you are welcome to email those on the waitlist to let them know they are in, send them course materials and alert them they will be offered a spot shortly.
In addition to our daily cancellation pending notifications we also recently implemented a weekly cancellation pending report to help ensure that these are processed in a timely manner.
-
John Dunlap commented
The challenge is that it is common for the roster to change a lot shortly before the class. We leaders need to get people registered quickly and even a 48 hour delay is enough to lose students or seriously impact our, and their, ability to get ready for the class.
As a suggestion perhaps worthy of consideration, it appears that the leader's ability to manage the roster and HQs responsibility to process refunds, etc are separate requirements. It isn't clear to me why the time required to process refunds creates a requirement that adding a replacement student be delayed. In the language of Business Process Reengineering, these are separate "use cases." The one transaction shouldn't have an impact on the second. Obviously, I don't know the full requirements. I'm just asking that this suggestion be added to the queue of web site modifications for evaluation. The current design does have a real impact on roster management.
A second consideration is that, at least in the Olympia branch, most leaders prefer to manage their own rosters. For all of our activities and courses we require that the students contact the leader directly before registering. The Mountaineers web site accommodates this for activities but I'm not sure it does for courses. For my course, people added themselves to the waitlist without my knowledge or opportunity to evaluate their abilities. Then, when a student cancelled, those on the wait list were automatically registered, again without my having any knowledge.