VETtrak 19.3.0 Release Notes - 14/11/2019

Version 19.3.0 is a major update from 19.2.x and includes database updates. Ensure you have a backup of your database before updating. If at all unsure please contact VETtrak Customer Support on 1800 838 872 or email support@vettrak.io.

The most significant changes are:

• 2020 AVETMISS changes.
• Digital credentials (ReadyCred).

Changes in 19.3.0.1 patch (14/01/2020)

1. International funding source translation. Generate National AVETMISS will now correctly translate a funding source of 31 or 32 back to 30 in the state funding source field in the NAT120 file when reporting for 2019.
2. National reporting NAT85. Generate National AVETMISS will now always generate a NAT85 file as requested by NCVER. The tickbox for this has been removed.
3. End of year generation highlight. The Generate AVETMISS wizards will now highlight when "Enforce end of year validation" is ticked to draw attention that additional validation rules will be applied, with an Info link to a help centre article that explains the rules.
4. New importers. Some performance improvements have been made to the new Importers. A few validation issues have also been fixed.
5. Archived VET Student Loans profiles. An issue causing archived VET Student Loans course of study profiles to not appear in the Qualification Manager has been fixed.

2020 AVETMISS changes

Changes have been made to VETtrak to allow you to comply with AVETMISS reporting changes for 2020. You can continue to report 2019 data as normal, with the additional fields for 2020 being available so that you can enter data now for enrolments that start or continue into 2020. For screenshots of each of the changes, refer to this article.

National changes

1. International funding sources. NCVER are splitting national funding source 30 "International client - other revenue" into two separate national funding sources from 2020: 31 "International onshore client - other revenue" and 32 "International offshore client - other revenue". Note that VIC has already adopted this change in 2019. Since 30 will no longer be valid from 2020, during the 19.3 database update, any reportable enrolments that continue into 2020 with national funding 30 will be changed to 31. When doing a 2019 generation, VETtrak will automatically report national funding of 31 or 32 as 30 so that the enrolment is reported correctly in both 2019 and 2020. Corresponding changes have been made to the state funding sources in the various states that use these national funding sources (QLD, SA, NT, TAS, ACT).

Victoria changes

1. At school not stated. SVTS will no longer allow the "At school" flag in the NAT80 file to be "Not stated" from 2020. Generate AVETMISS will report a validation error for this from 2020. The "At school" flag can be queried and bulk-updated for clients in Data Insights to allow you to find these. During the 19.3 database update, any client with an "At school" flag of "Not stated", that has a VIC reportable enrolment that continues into 2020 and has a "VET in schools" flag of Yes, will have their "At school" flag automatically updated to Yes.
2. No reporting of program enrolments with no activity. SVTS do not want a program enrolment to be reported until it has legitimate activity (ie. until it contains a result other than "Not yet started" or "Credit transfer"). When calculating missing program commencement dates, the start date of any units with an outcome of "Not yet started" will be ignored. This means that any enrolment that has only Not Yet Started results will not have a program commencement date calculated yet and will not be reported until one of the units is given a different result so that the program commencement date can be calculated. Note that Generate AVETMISS is not currently able to automatically exclude enrolments that have only Credit Transfer results - you will need to manage this by either not recording Credit Transfer results, or setting it to not reportable, until some other training activity is recorded on the enrolment.
3. Waiting for employer signoff outcome. A new outcome and result type for 79 "Waiting for employer signoff (Vic)" has been added. This should only be used from 2020.
4. Exclude units from claiming/invoicing. SVTS now allows you to "opt-out" of receiving reject messages for reported data that cannot be claimed, to avoid cluttering your SVTS validation results with expected rejects. The "Purchasing contract schedule identifier" in the NAT120 is reported as "EXC" to exclude the unit from claim creation, and reported as "R38" to exclude the unit from claim confirmation/invoicing. There are two ways to report these claim exclusion codes in VETtrak:
   1. A new "Claim exclusions" option when generating AVETMISS in VIC allows you to choose to bulk-exclude claims for all Credit Transfer outcomes, RPL outcomes, Not Yet Started outcomes, and/or Withdrawn outcomes with 0 hours. Ticking these options will report the "EXC" claim exclusion code for all reported units with an outcome matching any of the options selected.
   2. You can exclude specific enrolments from claiming by using the new "Claims exclusion" drop-down on the VIC state page in the Enrolment wizard. You can also exclude specific units from claiming by using the new "Claims exclusion" column in the Edit AVETMISS Values wizard.
5. This functionality is available immediately. For more information, refer to this article.
6. Workplace ABN. A new "Workplace employer" drop-down has been added to the VIC state page in the Enrolment wizard. This allows you to select the employer that is providing workplace-based delivery or practical placement, to report as the "Workplace ABN" in the NAT120 file from 2020 (note the selected employer must have an ABN entered). Alternatively, you can tick the new "Use enrolment's employer as workplace employer" tickbox if you want to report the enrolment's employer as the "Workplace ABN". Currently this is only mandatory for enrolments ending in 2020 or later that have the "Free TAFE" waiver and the "Workplace-based" delivery mode is selected, but this may become mandatory for enrolments with a "Workplace-based" delivery mode in future.
7. Subject enrolment identifier. The "Enrolment identifier" is now called "Subject enrolment identifier", to better differentiate it from the "Program enrolment identifier". When you choose to generate a new Program Enrolment Identifier, all Subject Enrolment Identifiers in that program enrolment will also be re-generated.

Tasmania changes

1. Industry of employment and occupation. The "Industry of employment" and "Occupation identifier" fields are now available in the Client Personal wizard when the collection state is TAS. These fields are reported in the NAT80 file from 2020. Generate AVETMISS will report a warning if these fields are empty and the client's labour force status indicates they are employed, but Skills TAS are planning to make this an error in mid-2020 so you must enter this data for all employed students starting or continuing in 2020.
2. Program enrolments. TAS have adopted VIC's "program enrolment" concept from 2020. New "Program commencement date" and "Program enrolment status" fields have been added to the TAS state page in the Enrolment wizard. TAS enrolments that have the same client, report-as qualification and program commencement date share the same program enrolment information (you can use the Existing button to more easily link an enrolment to an existing program enrolment). You should normally leave the commencement date empty when adding enrolments, as Generate AVETMISS from 2020 will automatically populate this with the earliest unit start date (excluding not yet started results) the first time a unit in the program enrolment is reported. Generate AVETMISS from 2020 will automatically generate unique program enrolment identifiers and use them to link the NAT120 and NAT130 files, and a NAT130 record will be reported for each program enrolment even if there's no award yet. You must link awards to enrolments to correctly report them in the NAT130. TAS (unlike VIC) allows you to change the qualification or program commencement date for an existing program enrolment after it has been reported if you need to, while retaining the same program enrolment identifier, so VETtrak will allow you to do this.
3. Tuition and resource fees. TAS now require you to report the tuition and resource fees charged from 2020. The Enrolment wizard will now require you to enter at least one pricing item of type "Tuition fee" and one pricing item of type "Resource fee" into the pricing grid (the amounts can be 0 if there was no charge) for TAS reportable non-fee-for-service enrolments with a finish date in 2020 or later. Don't forget you can use Funding Models to set up pricing with multiple items and apply it to enrolments to make this process easier. Amounts entered at the enrolled unit level will be reported in the NAT120 file, and amounts entered at the enrolment level will be reported in the NAT130 file, from 2020.
4. Income contingent loan indicator. A new "Yes, training is being provided under a VET Student Loan" tickbox has been added to the TAS state page in the Enrolment wizard. This will be automatically ticked if you link the enrolment to a VET Student Loan course of study. This tickbox is reported as the "Income contingent loan indicator" in the NAT130 file from 2020.

Western Australia changes

These changes have been made to comply with version 3.4 of the RAPT specification and they take effect immediately.

1. Fee exemption. A new fee exemption C "Child in State Government Care" has been added. Both the Course Fee and Resource Fee will be reported as 0 for this fee exemption.
2. Gender X. A client's gender of Indeterminate/Intersex/Unspecified will be reported as X instead of @.
3. Study reason. The study reason 13 "To gain skills for community/voluntary work" has been added.
4. Non-assessable outcome. The WA Enrolment Export wizard will now report an error if an outcome is not assessable (3 or 4) and the fee exemption is not F. The Fix Units button can now correct this error by updating the fee exemption on units with these outcomes to F.
5. Superseded outcome. The 61 "Superseded" outcome will now be treated as a completed unit when validating whether all units were completed for an award. The Course Fee will now be reported as 0 for this outcome.
6. Not yet started delivery mode. An outcome of 105 "Not yet started" is now allowed to have a predominant delivery mode of Z "Not applicable".
7. Fee exemption $0 fees alert. The pricing page in the Enrolment wizard will now show a side-bar alert if the WA enrolment's selected fee exemption is one that will report $0 for the course and resource fees (currently F, V or C).

Digital credentials (ReadyCred)

VETtrak customers can now issue digital credentials directly from within their student management system. Digital credentials enable education and training providers to transform the way they assess and recognise learning and skills.

Digital credentials provide training organisations a way to unlock their knowledge into discrete credentials, increasing student motivation with incremental recognition of their learning, and building new revenue streams for RTOs.

Students can share their digital credentials across various social media platforms and with potential employers, raising their personal profile, as well as that of the training organisation. This verified credential empowers employers to better differentiate between candidates with industry-ready skills.

To use digital credentials, you first set up the badge templates that you want to be able to issue. VETtrak allows you to map your VETtrak qualifications/courses to your badge templates. You can then use VETtrak to issue digital credentials to clients for their awards, which can be done for individual awards, or can be done in bulk by querying awards in Data Insights or when creating awards for occurrences.

For more information about ReadyCred, refer to this site. To activate the digital credentials feature, please contact VETtrak support on 1800 VETtrak or email support@vettrak.io

See our VETtrak Help Centre Section here: Digital Credentials

Other changes

1. Reported address for overseas students. The "Usual and postal addresses are overseas" tickbox on the address page in the Client Personal wizard has been changed to "This is an overseas onshore/offshore client". When this is ticked, it will no longer replace the address with the Not Specified/OSPC values and disable it. That means you can still enter an Australian address and use it everywhere in VETtrak as normal, but during AVETMISS generation, the usual and postal addresses will be reported as the Not Specified/OSPC values for any client that has this ticked.
2. 2020 public holidays. Public holidays for 2020 have been added.
3. Canvas LMS authentication. VETtrak's embedded web browser has been replaced by Chromium. This will improve your experience of the Canvas LMS integration authentication process.
4. Student Portal documents. New options to allow students to view Client Enrolment and Client Occurrence Enrolment documents in the Student Portal have been added to Global Preferences -> Student Portal page -> Documents tab.
5. View occurrence awards in Data Insights. You can now right-click the Enrolments node for an occurrence in the Programme Manager and go to "View records in Data Insights" -> "Awards" to quickly generate and run a Data Insights query that shows you all the awards that are linked to enrolments in the occurrence.
6. Copying occurrence details to enrolments. The "Set all details from the occurrence to the individual client enrolments" tickbox on the last page of the Occurrence wizard is now hidden by default, due to its potential to be used incorrectly to overwrite data. You can allow selected roles to access this tickbox by using the Security Manager to change the role(s) and turn on access to the "Allow copy of occurrence details to client enrolments" entity within Short Courses -> Enrolments, then restart VETtrak.
7. Create record from profile. The Create -> From Profile menu is now available if the user's role has access to a new "Create record from profile" entity (in the Security Manager for a role under Trainee Management -> Trainee profiles -> Enrolments). Previously this menu option was only available if the user had Add access to Profile, so this new entity allows you to give users access to create enrolments/contracts from profiles but not be able to add/edit profiles themselves.
8. SQL Server enrolments for contract performance. The performance of retrieving enrolments for a contract has been improved for larger SQL Server databases. This will improve the performance of related reports such as the Enrolment Export report.
9. Archived cost type error. An error that occurred when editing an occurrence cost that has an archived cost type has been fixed.
10. Client Importer error. An error that could occur when using multiple criteria for a related table in the new Client Importer has been fixed.
11. New Zealand add-on. In the New Zealand add-on, the residency "NZ Permanent resident" has been renamed to "NZ Resident Class Visa".