How accounts work: parents, students and account types

Tempo's account model matches how clubs actually work: usually a parent holds the login, pays the money, and acts for one or more children; sometimes an adult member books for themselves. Get the four account types straight and everything else in this category follows.

The four account types

• Parent: logs in, books and pays for their linked children, manages their profiles, receives the emails. One parent account can manage any number of children.
• Student with independent login: an adult member (or older teen, at your discretion) with their own email and password, booking for themselves.
• Parent-managed student (no login): a real record for the child, with no usable login or personal email. This is what makes everything line up: bookings, attendance, registers and history attach to the *child*, while payment and communication go through the parent. Staff can later enable a direct login for them (real email, password set-up link) when they're old enough.
• Teacher: register access on their phone and a trimmed account area; no shopping tabs, no customer emails. See Setting up teachers.

Staff create any of these from the members screen (Tempo → Students → Add new students; the menu label follows your vocabulary), along with an Office administrator type for front-desk staff who run the admin side.

Acting for a child

A parent with more than one child works with a selected child: the booking page and account screens always show who they're acting for, with a switcher to change. A parent with exactly one child never sees a switcher; the choice makes itself.

The critical safety property, in one sentence: who a parent may act for is decided by the staff-managed link between accounts, and re-checked on the server on every single action. A parent can never see or book for a child they aren't linked to, whatever they type into a browser. How links are made and managed is covered in Linking parents and children.

When the parent attends classes too

Plenty of adults book for their children and take a class themselves. That doesn't need a second account: the parent ticks "I also attend classes" on My Account → Students (or staff flick the same switch on Tempo → Students → Parent ↔ student links), and Myself joins their list of students everywhere it matters: the booking page's chooser, the Bookings filter, the profile chips and photo permission.

Booking as Myself is an ordinary adult booking in their own name, with the adult wording and the confirmation email to their own address, and their own profile has to be complete before they can book online, exactly as a child's would; the Profile tab's Myself chip is where they fill it in. Turning the switch off tidies Myself away again without touching anything already booked.

Who's who on the staff side

Site administrators and shop managers get the full Tempo admin (settings, timetable, bookings, credit, reports, member management); refund processing is administrator-only. Teachers get the register and protected-profile access (PIN-gated) and nothing else. Behind the scenes this is all granular permissioning, so a developer can build custom roles; day to day, the three-tier picture above is all you need.

One account can also hold several roles at once: a teacher with a child at the school is a teacher and a parent; a school administrator who teaches keeps the full admin alongside their register. Staff set this up when creating the account (Add new students carries an "Also holds these roles" set of ticks) or later from the WordPress Users screen, where Tempo adds an "Additional roles" box beneath the standard role dropdown. An account simply gets the combined permissions of every role it holds.

Where members live in wp-admin

Member accounts are ordinary WordPress users underneath, but you should rarely need the WordPress Users screen: the student directory under Tempo is built for the job, shows the club-relevant view, and edits profiles safely (the sensitive fields are encrypted and access-logged there).