Communication
Email notifications to parents
Which events actually email a guardian, what SMTP has to be configured first, and why some reminders never fire without a scheduled job.
Communication guide for day and boarding schools.
Last updated August 29, 2026
Every outbound email in Schoolyi is triggered by an event, not composed as a campaign. Enrolling a student sends a welcome sign-in link. Recording a payment can email the receipt. Publishing a notice emails the resolved audience. Advancing the dunning ladder emails the guardians of overdue fee lines. There is no separate mailing list, so the quality of your guardian email data is the quality of your parent communication.
Two independent switches decide whether a given person receives a given email: the school-level preference for that category, and the per-user preference on their own account. A guardian who has turned email off still sees the in-app item, which is why the notification bell remains the reliable channel for anything you cannot afford them to miss.
Events that email a guardian
| Event | Trigger | Needs a scheduled job |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome sign-in link | Enrollment or a portal invite | No |
| Fee receipt | Recording a payment, or resending from the receipt | No |
| Notice publication | Publishing to an audience that includes parents | Only when scheduled for later |
| Overdue fee reminder | A dunning ladder run | Yes |
| Homework due reminder | A reminder run | Yes |
The default dunning ladder
- One day overdue: in-app only, a friendly reminder
- Seven days: in-app and email
- Fifteen days: adds the SMS step, which currently only logs
- Thirty days: adds the WhatsApp step, which creates a staff-facing chat link
- A fee line advances at most one step per run, so a missed day is not made up by sending twice
Limits
Because every email is event-driven, the fix for silence is almost always upstream: a missing guardian email, an unpublished notice, or a cron that was never scheduled. Check those three before suspecting the mail server.
- There is no per-school template editor for transactional mail; message templates cover composed messages, not system emails
- Failed sends are recorded rather than retried automatically, so check delivery failures after a large fan-out
- Only one guardian address is used for fee reminders, so co-parents need the school to agree a primary contact
Common questions
Quick answers in plain language.
What has to be configured before any email sends?+
SMTP host, port, secure flag, user, password, and a from address. Without them nothing sends - not magic links, not receipts, not fee reminders. Platform Admin and office Admin can check delivery at /settings/email-test.
Do overdue fee reminders send by themselves?+
No. The dunning ladder only advances when its run endpoint is called, which is what scripts/run-school-cron.sh does daily when FEES_CRON_SECRET is set. Preview the effect first from the dunning settings screen.
Which address does a fee reminder go to?+
The primary active guardian email for that student, falling back to the student own address when no guardian email exists. The matching in-app notification is addressed to the student account.
Can we send bulk SMS or WhatsApp to parents?+
Not really. The SMS provider is a log-only stub, so nothing leaves the server. A WhatsApp dunning step creates an internal notification holding a click-to-chat link for staff to open by hand.
Related searches
School leaders and IT teams often search for: fee reminder email schools, and attendance alert email.