ParentMail Reviews 444

We have recently changed over to ParentMail. A good system with forms and email, less paper all over. However it is a nightmare to put dinner numbers in daily. In a school of almost 900 pupils it takes a day to put everyone's dinner in manually as there is no such thing as linking to SIMS for dinner patterns, nor putting a dinner pattern in once for a child and it will remember it. I have one member of staff putting dinners in all day. There must be an easier way!

Our local school switched over from parentpay to parentmail a little while ago. On the plus side parentmail has a lot more functionality, but unfortunately the interface seems poor and so does some of the functionality.
For example a standard function that most parents need to carry out is to top-up your child's dinner money. On a PC the only option on the main menu which seems relevant is payments (I'd kind of expect a shop or purchase option as I only want to make a payment after I have selected something to purchase). After clicking on payments you then get a screen which says you have no items to pay. Not very encouraging (and incidentally the home button disappears when you get to this screen) but then below this there is Shop option, and then the Shop has a Dinner Topup option (Dinner Money Topup might be slightly better wording). Why isn't the Shop option on the main menu which is displayed when you login?
In terms of functionality one thing which I really miss from parentpay is the ability to set up a reminder when dinner money is running low - a key requirement for parents, There seem to be plenty of notification options but none related to the dinner money balance dropping below a defined level - very poor; I don't want to have to login on a regular basis to see how much dinner money is left, or get a message from my child telling me that they couldn't have lunch because they didn't have enough money in their account.
Another frustration is to do with forms. Admittedly this may be to do with how the form is set up, but from what I could see it looks like it is due to the limited functionality which is available when building the form. The school often sends out forms asking if your child is going to an event. If they are not going you select the No option at the top, otherwise you select Yes and then you need to fill in lots of additional fields, select from additional options, etc. The problem is the school, quite rightly, makes all these required fields (because they all need to be completed if your child is attending the event), but that also means if you are not going you then have to select N/A for each option and also enter N/A into the text fields - painful and unnecessary. There should be some functionality to allow fields to be nested, so that a No at the top means all subsequent dependent fields are ignored.
So from my point of view as a parent a very unsatisfactory experience so far.

My daughter's school shared my personnel information and my daughter's personnel information with this website without my permission. No forms were signed, pretty sure this is in breach of data protection laws. I would NEVER tell a website I've never heard of my own date of birth, let alone my daughters. Complete breach of trust.

There is also an issue with the reviews on here, lots of one hit wonders. Suspicious!

Website app is not user friendly and is cumbersome to use. Not straightforward when logged in.....having to go backwards from drop down menu. Not impressed. Wanting to top up your child's dinner money account is not visible unless they have overspent.....rediculous.
Parentmail needs to employ a website designer who is good at understanding the general public and not over complicate a simple procedure.

Great system, reliable, simple and a great price.

Parentmail is a great system but it was unreliable during the recent period of bad snow. The system could not cope with the user demands and was out of action when parents needed to be contacted. The company said that one of the outages was ‘scheduled maintenance’. Users had not been notified of this in advance and it is very shortsighted to schedule maintenance during a period of high user demand. In reality, the system wasn’t working and it was disingenuous to call it scheduled maintenance surely? So a great system but has proven unreliable.

With regular use this system is fabulous for communications.

We like using Parentmail as a quick way to get in touch with parent's, particularly if it's short notice. We also use the email's a lot too. The only thing the parent's have commented on, that they are unable to reply to the emails on the app.

Parentmail is a very easy system to use and allows us to contact parents at short notice. Parents have told us they prefer this method of contacting them instead of sending letters.

Fantastic, no problems and it has made life for schools and parents so much easier.

Parentmail is an exceptional tool for use in schools and I would recommend it to other schools. My only point for not giving it five stars is that training is done over the phone, which is quite limiting when you are left to do things yourself. You do have on line chat which is good and a comprehensive help section. But personally I do not like phone training.

ParentMail PMX is generally brilliant, although there are a few glitches and niggles that could do with being sorted out!

This is probably a decent app but is clearly too hard to administer for school staff, if anything goes wrong they are unable to sort out and the company itself just pointed me back to the school re the issue, I ended up giving up on it. Annoyingly I sometimes get email notifications that I have communications to view, very irritating indeed.

It works for my wife though and seems adequate for what it is when it works.

I would love to give this a positive review I’m sure it’s great. However after following the link and entering my details I can no longer log back on as my email is not known apparently. The school says I’m registered their end and I cannot for love nor money contact ParentMail to try and resolve this issue.

I love this app, it's really easy to use and keeps me up to date with what's going o because my son never does!

Absolutely excellent, it's really intuitive and easy to use.

Just great, makes dealing with school things so much easier!

Love the forms bit in particular. I love the app it’s really helped me stay on track! fantastic!!