Ask Schoolyi

Schoolyi is school management software for day schools. It connects admissions, student records, class and section structure, timetables, attendance, assessments and report cards, fees and receipts, staff records, and family portals on one shared academic calendar with role-based access.

The point of running them together is that a change in one place, such as a new section or a corrected fee, reaches the other modules without an export and re-import.

Day schools running a defined academic year with class and section structure, scheduled fee cycles, and staff who need role-separated access. That covers most K-12 private, international, and independent schools.

It is a weaker fit for higher education credit systems, for boarding operations that need residential management, and for single-teacher or micro-school setups where the administrative overhead outweighs the benefit.

No, and we would advise against it. Most schools start with the one or two workflows carrying the most manual work, usually fees or admissions, run those through a complete cycle, then extend.

The modules share a student record, so a phased rollout does not mean maintaining separate systems: the later modules read the data the earlier ones already established.

The academic calendar is the source of truth for term boundaries, holidays, and working days, and several modules read from it. Attendance percentages, fee due dates, leave calculations, exam scheduling, and scheduled jobs all depend on which days count as working days.

Configuring the active academic year and syncing holidays is therefore the first setup step, before attendance or fees go live.

Schoolyi runs in the browser on phones and tablets, and there is an Android app for families and staff.

The web experience is the full product; the app is a convenience wrapper around the same account and permissions, so nothing is available in one and missing in the other.

An enquiry is captured with the applicant and guardian details, moves through the stages your school defines, and on acceptance becomes an enrolled student without the office re-typing anything.

The record created at enquiry is the same record that carries through to the class roster, so the student identity used in attendance and fees originates in admissions rather than being created again.

Yes. Applications can be submitted through a public form that feeds directly into the admissions pipeline, with document upload where your process requires it.

The office sees submissions in the same place as enquiries taken by phone or in person, so there is one queue rather than one per channel.

Guardians are records in their own right, linked to each of their children.

A second application from an existing family attaches to the guardian already on file rather than creating a duplicate, which matters later for communication and for sibling concessions on fees.

A student enrolling mid-term is placed into the current academic year and section, and fee obligations are calculated from the enrolment date rather than the start of the year.

Transfers out retain the historical record, including attendance and results already recorded, so the student can be reported on after leaving.

Yes.

Because enquiries, applications, offers, and enrolments are stages on the same record rather than separate lists, you can see counts and conversion at each stage for the current cycle, and compare against the equivalent point in a previous year.

Identity and contact details, guardian relationships, current class and section, enrolment history, attendance, assessment results, fee position, and documents attached during admissions.

It is one record read by every module rather than a copy per module, which is why a correction made once does not need repeating.

A class teacher opens their class and marks the register for the day or period, depending on how your school operates. Percentages are calculated against working days from the academic calendar, so holidays and non-instructional days do not depress the figures.

Absence patterns are visible without exporting to a spreadsheet.

Yes. Attendance can be captured per period against the timetable, or once per day, depending on what your school needs.

Period-wise is usual in secondary settings where students move between subject teachers; daily is usual in primary. Both feed the same percentage calculation.

Class and section structure belongs to an academic year, so the next year is set up alongside the current one rather than by overwriting it.

Students are promoted into the new structure, and the previous year keeps its rosters, attendance, and results intact for historical reporting.

Access is by role. A class teacher sees the students they teach, a registrar sees admissions and enrolment data across the school, finance sees fee position without needing assessment detail, and parents see only their own children.

Roles are configured during setup, and the intent is that each person sees what their job requires and not more.

A timetable assigns subjects, teachers, and periods to each section for the academic year, and downstream modules read from it: period attendance registers, teacher workload views, and substitute cover.

Changing a timetable entry updates the register the affected teacher opens rather than requiring a parallel notification.

You define assessment types, weightings, and grading scales for the academic year, then schedule instances against subjects and sections.

Marks entry is by the subject teacher, aggregation follows the weightings you configured, and the resulting grades feed report cards without a separate calculation step.

Yes. Grading scales are configured per school, including letter grades, points, percentage bands, or descriptive scales, and more than one can exist where different curricula or year groups need different treatment.

The scale is part of the academic year configuration, so changing it later does not rewrite historical results.

The correction is made against the assessment record, the aggregation recalculates, and the report card reflects the new value. Because the change is recorded rather than overwritten silently, the school can see that a correction occurred and when.

This is worth testing during evaluation, because it is a common workflow that many platforms handle poorly.

Report cards are generated from recorded assessment data against the template and grading scale you configured, reviewed before release, and then made visible to families through the portal.

Generation reads existing marks rather than requiring a separate compilation exercise, which is where most of the manual effort traditionally goes.

You define fee heads and the schedule on which they fall due, applied by class, section, or student category as your school requires.

The structure belongs to an academic year, so next year’s revision is configured alongside the current one and historical invoices continue to reflect the rates that applied when they were raised.

Yes. Concessions are applied to a student against a fee head, either as an amount or a proportion, and flow through to the invoice and the receipt the family sees.

Because the adjustment is recorded on the record rather than applied by editing an invoice by hand, the reason and the approver remain visible later.

Payments recorded at the office, including cash, cheque, and bank transfer, are supported directly, and online collection is available through payment gateway integration.

Which gateways are practical depends on your country and banking arrangements, so this is worth confirming for your specific setup rather than assuming.

Outstanding balances are visible per student, class, and school-wide against due dates from the fee schedule, so a follow-up list is a view rather than a monthly reconciliation exercise.

Reminders can be sent to guardians through the communication module using the same balance data.

No. Schoolyi handles fee billing, collection, receipts, and the school-side reporting on those, and it exports for your accounting package.

It is not a general ledger and does not perform statutory financial accounting. If you need automatic double-entry posting into a specific accounting system, treat that as an integration requirement to scope explicitly rather than an included feature.

Identity and contact details, role assignments, subject and class allocations, and leave records.

Role assignment is the same mechanism that governs permissions, so the record of what someone does and the access they hold do not drift apart.

Permissions are granted through roles rather than per person, and a member of staff can hold more than one role where the job requires it.

That covers the common case in smaller schools of one person handling both admissions and finance, without resorting to giving them full administrator access.

Yes. Leave is requested, approved, and recorded against the staff record, and entitlement calculations read working days from the academic calendar so term breaks are treated correctly.

Approved leave is visible when arranging cover for affected periods.

Payroll covers salary structure, recurring components, and payslip generation for school staff, using the attendance and leave data already in the system. It does not calculate country-specific statutory deductions for every jurisdiction, and it does not file returns.

Confirm the specific tax and social contribution requirements for your country during evaluation.

Yes, and that is the default position. A teacher sees the students in the classes and subjects assigned to them, marks their own registers, and enters marks for their own subjects.

Cross-school visibility is a separate permission granted to leadership and office roles.

Their own children only: attendance, published results and report cards, fee position and receipts, school announcements, and messages from the school.

Nothing about other students is visible, and results are visible only after the school publishes them rather than as marks are entered.

Announcements and targeted messages are sent from the school to selected audiences, addressed using the guardian records already attached to students rather than a separately maintained contact list.

That removes the usual problem of a message going to an address that admissions updated three months ago.

No. A guardian has one account linked to each of their children, and switches between them in the portal.

This is why guardian deduplication during admissions and migration matters: a family split across two records ends up with two logins and two sets of notifications.

Yes. A public school website can be published from Schoolyi, drawing on the same data for announcements and calendar information rather than being maintained as a separate site that drifts out of date.

It is intended for a straightforward school site, not as a general-purpose content management system.

The interface is available in several languages, and the public marketing site is translated where the translation has been reviewed rather than machine-generated.

If a specific language matters for your parent community, confirm its current coverage during evaluation instead of assuming full parity with English.

You provide student, guardian, staff, class structure, and fee data, usually as spreadsheets exported from your current system. The largest determinant of how smoothly it goes is source data quality: duplicate students, inconsistent guardian links, and fee heads that exist only in one person’s spreadsheet cost more time than the loading itself.

Cleaning before migration is time well spent.

For a single-campus school with reasonably clean data, plan four to eight weeks from decision to first live workflow, and a full academic term before every recurring cycle has run once in the new system.

Multiple campuses, accounting integration, or poor source data extend the first figure noticeably.

Yes. Student, attendance, assessment, and fee data can be exported for reporting and for your own records.

Establish the export formats and what is included before signing rather than after, because exit terms agreed at the start cost nothing and exit terms negotiated during a dispute cost a great deal.

Access is role-based so staff see only what their role requires, passwords are stored hashed rather than recoverable, and traffic is encrypted in transit.

Because a school holds minors’ data, guardian contacts, and assessment records, it is reasonable to go further than a feature list: ask where data is hosted, who at the vendor can reach production, and how that access is logged.

Schoolyi is a hosted web application and needs a connection for normal use. There is no full offline mode with local data capture and later synchronisation.

If your school has unreliable connectivity in the areas where attendance or marks are entered, treat that as a constraint to raise early rather than something to discover after go-live.

Licensing is scoped to school size and the modules in use, and quotes are prepared per school rather than published as a fixed public price list, because migration scope and training needs differ substantially between schools of the same enrolment.

Ask for a quote that separates recurring licence cost from one-off implementation so the two can be budgeted independently.

The period that matters most is the first complete run of each recurring task: the first fee cycle, the first attendance month, the first report card round. A team that has completed those in the new system is genuinely trained.

Agree named support cover through those first occurrences rather than through a fixed number of weeks.