Lauren

For most of you, this just means updating your device to iOS 15 or higher. If you are using iOS 12 or below, you’ll unfortunately need to switch to a device that can run iOS 15 or above. Up until now, it’s been possible to use Tapestry on older versions of iOS. But with the launch of an updated Tapestry – including a new Tapestry app and website improvements – coming in the 2025/26 academic year, this will change. The new version will require iOS 15 or higher. We’ve always made every effort to keep Tapestry accessible on older devices for as long as possible. But to keep your data secure, ensure a smooth experience, and introduce new features, we need to use modern tools that only work on newer operating systems. Security is a big part of this decision. Apple stopped supporting iOS 14 and below in 2021. That means devices running those systems no longer get updates to protect against new threats. While Tapestry has a strong built-in security, it can’t protect the rest of your device. To stay fully protected, we always strongly recommend updating your operating system if you can. What this means for you If you’re using iOS 13 or 14: You’ll need to update your operating system to iOS 15 or higher to keep using Tapestry. See our FAQ below for help on how to do this. If you’re using iOS 12 or below, or can’t upgrade to iOS 15: Unfortunately, you’ll need to use a different device that supports iOS 15 or above to access Tapestry after the update. We know this may be frustrating – especially at a time when budgets are tight. That’s why we’re letting you know in advance and offering affordable device options in our FAQ. Please know this wasn’t a decision we made lightly. Keeping your data safe and providing a smooth, reliable experience is our top priority. FAQS When will the update happen? We are currently planning to release these updates in late 2025, during the autumn term. To stay informed, sign up for updates. You can also sign up for our newsletter for more general updates about this and other new Tapestry features. What is iOS? iOS is the operating system used on Apple devices like iPhones and iPads. It’s the software that runs everything—from apps and the web browser to your device’s settings. The number after "iOS" refers to the version. iOS 1 launched with the first iPhone in 2007. The latest version is currently iOS 18. iOS 26 (Apple are changing how they name their ios versions so they line up with the year following their release) is expected in September. How do I update? Go to Settings > General > Software Update on your iPhone or iPad. If an update is available, follow the on-screen instructions. What should I update to? You should always update to the latest version your device supports. This helps ensure the best performance, compatibility with apps and websites, and the highest level of security. Do you recommend any other devices? Yes – we’ve put together a list of affordable, compatible devices here. How long will iOS 15 be supported? We can’t say for sure. iOS 15 works for now, but future updates—like iOS 19—might use technology that no longer supports it. Also, some of the tools we use for [Product] may stop supporting iOS 15 in the next couple of years. If you’re buying a new device, we recommend choosing one that supports a newer version of iOS, if possible. We’ll give you plenty of notice if we plan to stop supporting iOS 15. Does this affect me if I’m not using an Apple device? Not directly—but we still recommend keeping your operating system up to date. We’ll soon be increasing our minimum requirements to: Android 8 or higher Amazon Fire OS 7.3.2.2 or higher We don’t currently offer apps for other operating systems, but you can use Tapestry on any modern, up-to-date web browser.

Managers can now enable MFA for all managers, all staff, and/or all relatives from within the control panel. Provided that the user’s email is secure and available, this can help to prevent a stolen or guessed password from being used to access a Tapestry account. Once enabled, when a user first logs in with their email and password, they will be emailed an authentication code that they must enter in order to continue with their login. They will need to complete the process of receiving and entering a code every 30 days and whenever they login from a new IP address. Note PIN only users cannot receive an emailed code, but do still need a staff or manager user to fully log in and switch user before they can access Tapestry using their PIN. Our 'How to use MFA' tutorial explains how to enable MFA on your account:

We have released another update for iphone and ipad users. This is another very small update without any new features, but it should improve your overall experience with the app.

We have released another update for iphone and ipad users. This update includes some changes behind the scenes to improve your experience. It also paves the way for 2 new features - both of which are lined up to be released fairly soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

From today, when a new account is logged into for the first time or when a new manager first logs into an existing Tapestry, they will see a 'setup checklist'. This is a list of some of the most important elements of a Tapestry account e.g. Features, user permissions, and contact details. New managers should check they are all set up in the way that works best for their school, early years setting, or childminding business. All the items in the checklist are available in the control panel.

You can now export your register data (for children and for staff) in CSV files. You'll find that within the Booking section - in Exports > Register.

Once a manager has added a phone number and/or collection password for a relative, those will appear on the relative's profile page under User Details.

This is the latest update to the iOS app. This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Apple phones and tablets. As well as a few tweaks and improvements, this release includes the ability to view, add, and remove Body Maps.

A few new small additions/tweaks have been added to our Invoicing feature. Users can now: - manually set the invoice date and invoice due date when creating an invoice, - create payments for inactive children, - add funded hours to the booking and billing data exports, - see an "as of" date for the account balances shown on invoices.

Today we have released our ‘Messaging’ feature for the apps and the browser! This new feature will allow 1 to 1 direct conversations between a staff member and either a relative, or another staff member. A few things to know: Users can receive notifications, including push notifications to their devices, when they receive a new message. Managers will be able to see all conversations. They will be able to delete messages from conversations they are not a part of, but they cannot add their own messages into a conversation between 2 other people. Users will be able to see a date stamp for when messages were sent and received, and will see ‘seen’ and a date stamp when a message they have sent has been read. Managers can disable it for all/specific relatives and staff within the User Permissions section of the Control Panel. Too see some pictures and find out a bit more, take a look at our Messaging Feature page. Managers will see the icon for it on the browser version of Tapestry automatically, but they will have to specifically enable it for it to: appear for staff and relatives, to show up on the apps, and for people on their account to start using it.

This latest release for apple users is just a small one to fix a crash we could see for parent/relative users when they tried to access care dairy notifications.

This long awaited update includes the Care Diary (for staff and relatives) and the Register! We’ve also made a design change to fit those in – a new menu bar at the bottom of the screen. You can read more about the Care Diary and Register features on our tapestry.info website. This version is only compatible with devices running iOS 15 or above. Most of you will be able to upgrade to that even if you’re only on iOS 13 or 14 currently, but unfortunately it does mark the end of our support for very old apple devices (iphones and ipads from 2014 or earlier and all ipod touches except the ipod touch 7).

Data about the invoices you generate on Tapestry for your parents and carers can now be exported in bulk. You will choose the date range and the children you'd like the export to cover, and Tapestry will generate an excel file which includes: - Invoice numbers - Invoice dates (create, due, and period covered) - Child name - Amount - Current Status - Whether it has been paid You can include a summary line item as well if you choose.

We have teamed up with a publisher, Group Hugs, to offer professionally printed copies of children’s journals. Prices start at £14.95 + postage and can be purchased by the schools and settings or by parents and carers directly. When managers on a Tapestry account export PDF copies of the journals for parents and carers, the relatives will see an option to purchase a printed copy of the journal, alongside the existing option to download the PDF copy for free. Relatives, schools, and settings can also order printed journals by uploading PDF copies to Group Hugs. This is particularly useful when it comes to ordering backdated copies. In a few weeks you will also be able to purchase multiple copies at once. You can see more information and the full price list on our tapestry.info website.

Today we have released a Summative Assessment screen for Bespoke Frameworks. That joins the Thoroughness screens in the Tracking menu. Those of you who have added one or more Bespoke Frameworks can use this screen to: View and monitor attainment for each child in each period. You’ll be able to see the assessments that have already been made. This is shown via a tick next to the parts of your framework that have been selected, and a drop down displaying the most recently chosen scale. You’ll also be able to tap on ‘Show Details’ to see a list of the corresponding observations and any overrides that have been made in this period. Override any assessments you think need updating, and add quick new assessments. You can use the tick boxes and scale drop downs to make assessments – these can be overrides of existing ones or filling in gaps. You can add as many assessments as you like in one go, but they will have to be per child. Once you have saved your assessments, a new ‘staff only’ observation will be created to act as a record – that way you will be able to easily see who added the assessments and when. You can edit those observations to add any notes or evidence if you’d like. Lock each period for each child. If a period is not quite over yet, but you don’t want any further observations made during it to impact what is recorded in the summative assessment screen, you can ‘Lock’ it. Export data to CSV or PDF. This is our latest monitoring screen for bespoke frameworks, but it won’t be last! The next one is most likely to focus on progress. If you have requests for what you’d like to see in that, please get in touch – customer.service@eyfs.info. The Bespoke Frameworks feature is available to all Tapestry users as part of your subscription. To see more about it please take a look at our Bespoke Framework feature page.

A new Android app update is now out (version 5.1). This is for those of you using the Tapestry app on Android and Amazon Fire devices. There's nothing terribly exciting in this update, but it does fix a few minor bugs and does include some prep work for the next release - which will include new functionality!

Those of you with really large bespoke frameworks should find the Thoroughness page a little more manageable now - you can collapse/expand sections of your framework so you are only looking at the bits you're interested in.

There have been a few new tweaks to our existing billing and booking functionality. - Payment reminders. We know chasing parents for fees can be a bit awkward. To make it a little easier, we’ve added the ability to send a short message from Tapestry telling them how much is owed and how to pay it. You’ll find a button to do that on the Account Balances and Children > Finance pages. - Show a count for unpaid and unsent invoices. This is a small but useful change. You can now see how many unpaid/unsent invoices there are on the relevant tabs on the Invoices page. - Tweaks to some warning/info messages to make them a bit clearer. - New history events for adding / editing / removing a child's billing address. - Layout improvements to the child & staff registers on small screens

If you are a Tapestry user and would like some or all of your data to be deleted, in most cases you will need to contact the school, nursery, or childminder who set the account up. They will be able to delete/amend your account and any content within Tapestry. That is because they are what is known as the 'data controller' and we are the 'data processor'. This means only they can decide what data is collected and stored or otherwise processed by Tapestry, and we can only follow their explicit instructions. If you are a manager on the account, or you have any questions, you can email us at customer.service@eyfs.info and we'll be happy to help! You can find out more by reading our data processing agreement. The most up to date version can be found here: https://tapestry.info/security.html

Introducing the staff register! This online only register lets your team members sign themselves and their colleagues in and out. - You can order the staff list by first or last name. - Notes can be recorded and in/out times can be edited or deleted as needed. - By clicking on a staff member you’ll be able to see their registration history for the day; when they were signed in and out and who by. - Edits to sign in/out times are noted in your History section. The history entry will include the original time.

Here is another round of changes for the management system. This time they’re to do with the invoicing section and it’s a big ‘un! 1. The main addition is the ability to record and allocate payments, then view how much credit/debit each child’s account is in within ‘Account Balances’. You’ll add a record of payments from each child’s new ‘Finance’ tab (go to Booking > Children > choose a child > then look in the tabs under their name and profile picture). Those payments will be automatically assigned to the child’s invoices, starting with the oldest one, but you can overrule that and allocate money to specific invoices if you choose. Receipts for the payment will be emailed to the assigned bill payers. You can edit and delete records of payments The new Account Balances tab (go to Booking > Finance > Account Balances) will show you the balance for each child’s account and clearly indicate whether it is in credit or debit. There are page filters here to show accounts in just one or the other and for each room. Each child’s current balance will show up in a few places; within the Account Balances page, on their Dashboard, within their Finance tab, and on new invoices. You can prevent the balance from showing up on PDF copies of the invoice if you like from within the ‘Config’ area. Note: So you don’t start out with all of children having a huge negative account balances, today we have auto added payments for all of your invoices currently marked as paid. The payment will be logged as being made on the day you marked the invoice as paid, and the payment type will be ‘other’ (as opposed to cash, BACS, direct debit, or however else they actually paid). Tapestry will not auto add payments moving forward. 2. For each child you’ll see a new tab – ‘Finances’. There are two tabs with that, one for their invoices and one for Transactions. The Invoices one is almost the same as what you could see up to now, except we’ve dropped the status filter, and added a check box so you can set whether you see cancelled invoices or not. The ‘Transactions' tab shows a full list of payments and invoices for this child. 3. You’ll also do this from each child’s new ‘Finances’ tab. The name and address you set there will appear on invoices moving forward. You have been able to set the bill payer from the Invoices page for a while, but you can now also set the bill payer from the Manage Relatives section of the Control Panel (on the 'Adding/Editing a relative' screen or via Manage Relationships). 4. Invoice Status changes Whereas up to now an invoice’s status could be ‘Paid’ or ‘Sent’ or ‘Unsent’, we’ve separated out the statuses into a payment one and a sent one. We’ve added a new status – ‘Part Paid’. That’s for invoices that have had some money allocated but not the full amount yet. 5. Funding changes Quite a few of you told us that you need to be able to allocate funding in smaller chunks than 15 mins. We’ve made that change, so you can now apply any number of minutes. When you’re setting up the funded hours within new regular schedules, you might also notice that instead of a setting wheel to choose whether you view it in minutes or as a decimal, there is a check box. 6. Export your invoices You can now export invoice data from the Exports sections 7. A new tab for extra charges In the Rooms section, you’ll now see an Extra Charges tab. This will show you how many times each of your Extra Charges have been charged on each day and for each day as a whole. 8. Other. There are a couple of other little things. You’ll see a new section on each invoice for Payments allocated to it. There are new history events within the control panel for new actions (e.g. recording a new payment) If you generate a negative invoice (this is one where the parent would have a credit, rather than a charge as usual), that credit will be auto allocated as a payment to the next invoice which is a charge. The above is live on all active Tapestry accounts now. If you’re not currently using the Invoicing feature and want to know more about it, take a look at the Invoices feature page on our information website.

We have just released the latest round of management system features! This round includes the following: 1. Extra Charges You can now add products, services, and consumables as ‘Extra Charges’. You’ll set the price for each of these when you create them. You’ll then attach the relevant ones to each child’s Regular Schedule or as one-off extras to automatically appear on their next invoice. 2. Assign bill payers and send invoice links This release gives you the ability to select the bill payer/s for each child from their list of relatives. After you’ve generated an invoice, you can choose to send it directly to them simply by clicking the ‘Send’ button when viewing the invoice, or ‘Send invoice’ from the cog on the full list of invoices. Those parents and carers will then receive an email and an internal Tapestry notification with a link to the invoice in. 3. A filter for invoice statuses Next time you go to your list of invoices, you’ll be able to see a new ‘status’ filter. With this filter you can select which types of invoice you’d like to see, meaning you can quickly and easily hide ‘cancelled’ ones, pick out the ones that are currently ‘unsent’, or find those that are ‘sent’ but not marked as ‘paid’ yet. 4. Prefilled new Regular Schedules based on the child’s previous one. To save you some time when you’re adding in your new Extra Charges or when you just want to make a small change to a child’s Regular Schedule, new Regular Schedules will now auto-populate with the child’s most recent previous schedule. You can then edit, add, and remove those sessions and charges as necessary. 5. New configuration options for invoices If your bill payers find the full breakdown of Regular Schedules on invoices a little bit too much, you can swap that out, or additionally include, a summary view for the PDF. That still shows the different sessions that are included but tells you the quantity of each session rather than listing each individually. With both the summary and detailed view you can choose whether to include the rates you charge or not. 6. Additional tweaks We've also included a few little tweaks to improve the general usability of the Invoices feature: - Session prices visible on the Sessions Config overview page. - Invoices of children with the statuses ‘Awaiting Deletion’ and ‘Inactive’ remain on your Invoices list (but please do still export copies of all their invoices for your own records). - An improvement to the "next child" functionality when working through invoices. You can read more about the Invoices feature on our website.

Children who sign into Tapestry themselves via the Child Login feature and who have had observations published for them in the Cherry Garden assessment framework will now be able to watch and interact with their Cherry Garden trees/flowers. The animation is a lovely way for them to see their progress and clicking on the leaves will reveal the observations, which act as a memory jog for all the brilliant things they've been doing. If you're not familiar with Cherry Garden, you can find out more on the Cherry Garden feature page.

Those of you using the Online Register will now see figures at the top of the page for the number of children currently expected (based on your Booking data) and the number of children currently attending (based on who has been signed in within the online register).

Today we have released the 3rd major part of the Tapestry Management System – Invoices. It joins Booking and Registers and is available on all Tapestry accounts at no additional cost. From now you’ll be able to set prices for your sessions, assign funded hours to each child’s regular schedule, and generate invoices based on your booking data. Here are the things you’ll be able to do, in a bit more detail: Set fixed, or hourly prices for each session. These can be a set cost for all children or based on age. Set up the types of funded hours you offer. Define how much you receive from your LA per funded hour (this will be useful for later features, but won’t impact the prices you charge per session now – funded hours are always completely free) Allocate funded and unfunded hours to each child’s Regular Schedule and see how much will be charged for each session. Have invoices generate with the click of a button – the costs they include will be based on your booking data and account for any changes since you last invoiced, so also include any necessary adjustments. Add line items (additional fees and refunds/reductions). Set invoice statuses (unsent, sent, paid, overdue) and add notes. Export PDF copies of each invoice View a list of all invoices or for just 1 child at a time. This is available on the browser version of Tapestry, in the ‘Booking’ section. To find out more and see some pictures, take a look at the Invoices Feature page. If there are any tweaks or additional functionality you would particularly like to see as part of the invoices section, or even if you just have some general feedback on it, please get in touch by emailing us: customer.service@eyfs.info.