Operations overview

Operations covers the non-academic side of running a school: moving children, lending books, holding stock, buying things, keeping documents, maintaining the room list, and hiring staff. Every module shares the same sign-in, activity log and reporting shell as the academic modules, so a duty sheet, a library fine and a purchase order approval all land in the same audit trail as a grade publish. What they do not share is one permission. Each module has its own gate, and there is no such role as operations staff.

Sequence the rollout by where the money and the risk sit. Transport and library both write fee instances, so they deserve attention before inventory and procurement, which only touch budgets and expenses. Read the gate for a module before you promise it to somebody, because several are narrower than the sidebar suggests: procurement and vendors admit only Platform Admin and Support Staff - Purchasing, while every transport setup change needs Platform Admin, Principal or Vice Principal.

Modules and who can change them

What depends on a scheduled job

This is the most useful thing this page can tell you before go-live: nothing in the product runs itself on a timer. scripts/run-school-cron.sh is the daily runner, and with FEES_CRON_SECRET set it calls library reservation expiry, scheduled notice publishing, homework due reminders, fee autopay and dunning, the transport, conversation and activity-log retention purges, the activity chain verification and the observability alert evaluation. Add ADMISSIONS_CRON_SECRET and it also expires admission offers. If nobody puts that script in crontab, none of those steps ever happens and the screens give no hint that they are missing.

• Transport GPS pings are deleted after 30 days and boarding events after 730, both only through the retention purge in the runner.
• Scheduled notices also publish lazily when somebody opens /notices, so they are the one step that partly survives a missing cron.
• Inventory, procurement, files, classrooms, events and HR have no time-based behaviour at all. Nothing expires, reminds or reorders on its own.
• Vehicle insurance, fitness and driver licence expiry within 30 days is calculated when somebody opens /transport/documents or /transport/dashboard. It is a screen you have to visit, not an alert that finds you.

Where operations touches student and money records

• Transport assignments and library lendings are keyed to student accounts, so the roster comes first.
• Assigning a student to a stop that carries a monthly fee writes monthly TRN instances through to the end of the academic year, capped at twelve months.
• Receiving a purchase order commits spend against its budget and writes a paid expense, so procurement posts into finance the moment goods are marked received.
• Onboarding a hire through careers creates the login and the employment profile. Teaching assignments and payroll remain separate steps.
• Files and events publish nowhere by themselves. The public site keeps its own copies under /school-website.

Limits

• No shared operations dashboard. /ops reports platform health, not operational workload.
• No reorder points in inventory, and no maintenance or servicing record outside laboratory equipment.
• The classroom list feeds the timetable and exam venue pickers; it does not accept room bookings.