Both PosiEd and Salesforce Education Cloud are designed with one primary purpose in mind, : to put the student first and foremost.
To that end both architectures are designed to provide immense maximum levels of flexibility and detail to support even the most complex multi school, multi campus environments. In many SIS applications, offering students flexibility to do things like enroll in more than one campus at a time, to move between classes without interrupting academic assessment, to provide innovative course structures such as IIB and RTO in addition to HSC etc., have all come with the price of compromise when it comes to the architecture and storage of the records on of those students. Many schools often resort to notes and separate applications to keep track of the sometimes complex details.
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The second step is to create Person Account records for their family and carer contacts. These can be associated with the student contact via Contact/Contact Relationships. Review how relationships are to be optimally configured. How the cascading of contact details will work and how data import of these relationships can occur?
Billing Account
A Billing Account record should then be established. This is an account of type Billing Account and this is the level at which all billing for one or more students to a single bill payer is made. It is also the point at which contract associations, etc., are made.
Once the Billing Account record has been created, link the Student Account record link to the Billing Account. [Under Development]
Academic Term Enrollments
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Each year, the student should have a new Academic Term Enrollment record created for them and these records will also consequently subsequently be associated with Course Offering Participant records, which in turn are associated with Cohort Members.
Other
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Account Record Types
PosiEd and EDC require a number of account record types to be configured, including Grade Levels, House, Tutor/Roll Group and so on. (there There are others such as Department Educational Institution, etc., but these are not relevant for this discussion)
A common question as is - Why why are these entities set up as Accounts as opposed to simple pick lists? The reason is that Account relationships provide a more flexible and long-term recording of various associations. It allows you to, for example, see that a student moved from one Roll Group to another which is something that you can't see with just a picklist.
These associations also provide better reporting such as generating the Program Term Application Timeline (PTAT) reports. Note review this.
These Account records need to be set up prior to establishing Student Records and and Academic Term Enrollments.
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