This page explains how Foundation Roster tracks a child’s full experience with your program, from first contact to final withdrawal. By understanding how Leads, Students, and Journeys work together, you can tell a clear business story for every family and keep your records consistent over time.
Foundation Roster Concepts #
Let’s start with a few concepts and definitions:
Lead
A Lead represents a family that is not yet a customer. Leads are typically parents and usually include at least one associated child. This is where every journey begins. From a business perspective, a Lead represents a conversation, a discovery of needs, and the possibility of a new enrollment.
Student
A Student represents a child who is enrolled in your program. Once a parent becomes a paying customer and the child begins attending, that child is tracked as a Student. The Student record reflects the active enrollment portion of the journey.
Journey
A Journey is the complete, time-bound experience a child has with your program. It starts when the child first enters your system as part of a Lead and continues through enrollment as a Student, ending only when the child is withdrawn. Each journey tells the full story of interest, enrollment, participation, and completion.
About Student Journeys #
Foundation Roster does not use the word “Journey” directly on any screens. We found that showing the term inside the app created more questions than clarity. Instead, Journey is used as a guiding concept to help explain how the system works behind the scenes. You don’t need to manage journeys explicitly – the app already does this for you.
How a Journey Flows
Most journeys begin with a Lead. As conversations happen and needs are assessed, that same journey continues when the child enrolls and becomes a Student. From first contact through active enrollment, everything is part of one continuous journey.
A journey may last a single month or span several years. What matters is that it remains continuous. The journey only ends when the child leaves your program.
Ending a Journey
When a child leaves your program, their Student record should be marked as Withdrawn. This signals that the journey is complete. Withdrawn Students are no longer active and should not appear in your Current list.
At any given time, a child should have only one active journey. You should not see the same child listed multiple times as active. A helpful way to think about this is school grades: a child may have many grades over time, but only one current grade at once.
When a Child Returns
If a child returns after being withdrawn, that return always starts a new journey. From a business standpoint, this represents a new conversation, a fresh assessment of needs, and a new customer agreement – even if the outcome looks very similar to the previous enrollment.
Because of this, a returning child should always start as a new Lead, which then flows into a new Student record once they enroll. This makes it clear that the child left and later came back, and it allows Foundation Roster to report on these experiences accurately.
Long Lead Timelines
Sometimes a journey takes time to move from first contact to enrollment. Even if the Lead phase stretches over several weeks, it should still be treated as one journey – as long as the child has not withdrawn and returned. This keeps reporting consistent and aligned with how journeys are defined.
Handling Duplicates
If duplicate records are accidentally created, choose the correct one to keep and mark the other as Closed: Duplicate. This helps ensure each journey is represented only once and keeps your lists easy to manage.
By thinking in terms of journeys, you can better understand what your data is telling you: who came in, who enrolled, who stayed, who left, and who decided to come back for another chapter.
