A Cozi alternative for school paperwork

Where school paperwork gets stuck

A calendar holds what someone puts in it, and nothing more. The school email lands at 9:40 PM with 4 dates, a form and a note to send $5 for the book fair. Someone has to read it, type each date in and decide who’s doing what.

On the free and Gold plans, that typing stays with whoever reads the email first. Often, that’s the same parent every week. Cozi Max can pull invitations and calendar details out of your inbox, but a school email is more than an event: it’s a form to sign, $5 to send and someone to do each part.

Then there’s paper. The calendar can hold the due date for the permission slip, but the slip still sits in the backpack, and the vaccine card still sits in a drawer.

What Cozi does well

Cozi is a free shared calendar and list app for iPhone, Android and the web. Each person has a color, so you can see who’s involved in each event at a glance.

Its shopping lists, to-do lists, meal planner and recipe box are shared with the whole family. Everyone else gets notifications and agenda emails when plans change.

Cozi Gold is $39 a year. It removes the ads and adds a month view on mobile, calendar search, up to 3 reminders per event, change notifications, a birthday tracker and a shopping mode.

Cozi Max is $79.99 a year. It adds automatic event import, which Cozi says turns “invitations and calendar details from your inbox” into events on the Cozi calendar. Cozi’s page doesn’t say how it reaches your email, so check before you connect it.

If your family’s week lives on a grocery list and a color-coded calendar, Cozi is hard to beat, and the free version goes a long way.

Mapa and Cozi, side by side

Why you might keep both

The two apps do different jobs. Cozi is where the grocery list lives. Mapa is where the school email goes.

One way to split it: Cozi holds the milk, soccer practice and Tuesday’s tacos. Mapa holds the field trip slip, the early dismissal on Fri, Oct 23 and the flu shot record.

Mapa won’t replace your Cozi lists, and it can’t bring them over. If you’d rather keep everything in one app, Cozi, or an all-in-one app like Sense, may suit you better.

Choose Mapa if…

• School emails arrive faster than anyone can type them in.
• You’d rather snap the permission slip than retype it.
• You want one adult’s name on every job, and the adults involved reminded before it’s due.
• You want vaccine and allergy records kept with the original photo, and answers with a link to it.
• You want forwarded emails to wait for your OK before anything changes.

Choose Cozi if…

• Your family runs on a shared grocery list and to-dos.
• You like typing events in yourself and seeing each person’s color.
• You want a meal planner and a recipe box.
• You want native iPhone and Android apps and a free plan.

How to try Mapa next to Cozi

1. Keep Cozi as it is.
2. Forward 1 school email to your family’s Mapa address, and check the suggested events in the Inbox.
3. Snap 1 form in the chat, like a permission slip or a sign-up flyer.
4. Invite the other adult, and tap “I’ll handle it” on your jobs.
5. At the end of the 7 free days, decide which jobs each app does best.

What Mapa doesn’t do

• Grocery lists, meal planning or recipes.
• Chore charts or kid rewards.
• Import from Cozi or any other app.
• Read your inbox. It only sees what you forward or send.
• Run as a native iPhone or Android app yet.
• Sync with Google Calendar or iCloud yet. Both are being tested.