Platform admin first month

Go-live proves the system starts. The first month proves the school can run on it, and the failures in that month are almost never technical — they are records nobody has filled in yet. The sequence below is ordered by dependency: attendance cannot work before homerooms exist, fee collection cannot work before instances are generated, published results cannot be trusted before the grading scale is set, and none of the automated reminders run before a cron entry exists on the server.

Week 1 — make the daily register work

The decision this week is which member of staff is the homeroom teacher of each section, because that single field on the class record controls the whole attendance surface. Subject assignments do not grant it. Set Class teacher and Co-class teacher at /classes; a teacher is only eligible if their staffType is PRT or they already hold an active subject assignment to that class, so gaps here usually mean a missing employment record at /school-staff.

• Fill Class teacher on every active section at /classes, then have one teacher per grade confirm they can open /attendance and save a register.
• Confirm outbound mail once, from /settings/email-test. Almost every downstream complaint — invites, absence alerts, receipts — is really this.
• Issue parent portal logins at /parents for families who need them. A guardian record without a login sees nothing, and siblings need separate records.
• Watch /activity-log for failed sign-ins and unexpected role activity while the roster is still churning.

Week 2 — open fee collection deliberately

The decision this week is whether families pay online or at the counter first. Counter-only is the safer opening: it needs fee structures, generated instances, and a trained desk, and nothing else. Online pay adds gateway configuration and a payment mode to get right before parents ever see a Pay button. Either way, generate instances in bulk before you tell anyone collection is open, and read the class summary so nobody is billed twice or missed entirely.

• Run /fees/bulk-generate for the active year, then review /fees/class-summary before announcing anything.
• Take one real payment at /fees/collections and confirm the receipt actually arrives by email.
• Install the daily cron now if you use autopay, the dunning ladder, or scheduled notices: schedule scripts/run-school-cron.sh with FEES_CRON_SECRET. Without it those features are silently inert rather than broken.
• Agree who owns /fees/defaulters and how often they work it. The list is only useful with a human process behind it.

Week 3 — teaching adoption

The decision this week is whether the timetable is published. A draft grid is invisible to teachers and families, blocks period attendance, and stops substitute cover being generated when leave is approved — approving leave with a substitute creates one arrangement per published slot, so an unpublished grid produces silence rather than an error. Publish from /timetable, and set the grading scale at /settings/grading-scale before any result reaches a parent, because changing boundaries afterwards means re-publishing report cards.

• Publish the timetable, then confirm a teacher sees it under the View tab and any cover under My substitutes.
• Set the grading scale before the first assessment is published, not after.
• Pick two or three teaching habits to push — homework publishing, lesson plans, syllabus coverage — rather than launching every module at once.
• If the school runs buses, assign duty at /transport/duty so live tracking and boarding alerts have something to report on.

Week 4 — hardening and handover