Erudite IMS

Signing in

1. Open the application address in a browser. You land on /Account/Login.
2. Enter your username or email and your password. The field accepts either.
3. Select Sign in. Sessions last eight hours and extend while you keep working.
4. If your account was created for you, or an administrator reset it, you are redirected to /Account/ChangePassword and must set a new password before anything else opens. This is enforced by middleware — you cannot navigate around it.

Choosing a school (Super Admin only)

1. A Super Admin signs in above the level of any one school, so the next screen asks which tenant to work in.
2. Pick the school and select Continue. Every page you open afterwards is scoped to that school until you switch.
3. Ordinary school staff never see this step — their account belongs to one school already.

Finding your way around

1. The left sidebar groups the system by function. What you see depends on your permissions: menu entries you have no permission for are not rendered at all, rather than shown and refused.
2. The dashboard is the landing page. It summarises admissions, collections, staffing and class load.
3. Active students on the dashboard means learners on roll — admitted, active or suspended, counted once each, with a registered admission. Learners who have left, deferred learners and unregistered applications are deliberately excluded, so this figure is normally lower than the raw number of student records.

The learner lifecycle

A learner moves through three records, in order. Understanding them explains most of what the system does:

1. Admission — the application, carrying an admission number and the class applied for.
2. Registration — the admission accepted for a term. Only at this point does a student record exist.
3. Student — the active learner, carrying a student number and a lifecycle status.

This is why an unregistered application appears in admissions counts but not in student counts: the student record has not been created yet.

Admitting a learner

1. Open Admissions → Student Admissions and select New admission.
2. Complete the applicant's details and the class applied for. An admission number is assigned automatically.
3. Save. The application now appears in the admissions list as unregistered.

Registering an admission

1. Open Admissions → Student Registrations and start a registration for the term.
2. Select the admission and confirm. A student record and student number are created.
3. The learner now counts as on roll, appears on class registers and mark sheets, and becomes eligible for billing.

Bulk intake

1. Open Import Station and follow the seven-step wizard.
2. Download the template, fill it, upload, and review the validation results before committing.
3. Errors and results can be exported to Excel so they can be corrected offline and re-uploaded.

Moving, exiting and readmitting

1. Class changes move a learner between classes mid-year. The learner immediately follows to the new class for registers, marks and billing.
2. Student Exits records a withdrawal, transfer or other departure. Exited learners drop out of on-roll counts, class rosters, mark sheets and billing selection.
3. Reinstatement returns a previously exited or deferred learner to an active status.
4. Graduation moves a cohort to alumni at the end of their final year.

Taking attendance

1. Open Academics → Attendance and choose the class and the date.
2. If no register exists for that date, a blank one is built from the class roster — the learners whose effective class is that class, including a newly admitted learner who has not yet been assigned anywhere else.
3. Mark each learner and save. Once a register exists for a date, reopening it shows the stored entries rather than rebuilding the list, so previously recorded attendance is never silently altered.

Entering marks

1. Open Academics → Grade Book (/StudentMarks) and select New mark sheet.
2. Choose the class, term, subject and mark type. The learner list is the class roster.
3. Enter marks and save. The sheet saves as a whole.
4. To amend later, open the mark sheet and use Edit on the row.

If a learner is promoted or leaves between opening the sheet and saving it, the save still succeeds — the write path deliberately accepts anyone affiliated with the class, so a roster change mid-entry cannot discard a teacher's work. Saves that include such a learner are recorded in the audit trail.

Producing terminal reports

1. Open Academics → Terminal Reports and choose the class and term.
2. Enter class-teacher and head-teacher remarks and any traits. The head-teacher remark is permission-gated.
3. Generate the reports. Each learner's report renders on a single page as a PDF.

Report rosters follow current enrolment. Regenerating a past term's reports will therefore omit a learner who has since left the school.

Promoting a class at year end

1. Open Promotions and create a promotion from the outgoing class to the receiving class.
2. Review the learner list, exclude anyone repeating, and confirm.
3. Each promoted learner's current class assignment moves to the new class. From that moment they appear on the new class's registers, mark sheets and billing runs — and no longer on the old one's.

Recording an incident and escalating it

1. Open Student Life → Incidents and select New incident (requires the Staff Manage permission; viewing the list only needs Staff View).
2. Enter the incident details and date, then save. The incident starts in Open status.
3. Use Add student on the incident's detail page to link each learner involved, together with the action taken for that learner.
4. To take it further, select Escalate and choose the learner. This creates a new Disciplinary Issue pre-filled with the incident's date and description, and moves the incident itself to Escalated status automatically.

Status options on both incidents and disciplinary issues are Open, Under Investigation/In Progress, Escalated, Resolved and Closed. Resolving a disciplinary issue that came from an escalated incident automatically resolves the parent incident too, unless the incident is already Resolved or Closed.

Appointing a student leader

1. Open Student Life → Student Leadership and use Positions to define or edit the roles available (prefect, house captain, and so on) — this needs the Leadership Manage permission.
2. From a learner's record, or from the leadership list, select Assign. Choose the position, the academic year, optionally a term, and a start date.
3. Saving the assignment sends the appointment notice automatically; there is no separate "notify" step.
4. Use End on an active assignment to close it out with today's date once the learner's term in the role finishes.

Running a student leadership election

1. Open Student Life → Student Leadership Elections and select New election. Set the nomination window and the voting window — voting cannot start before nominations close.
2. While the election is still in Draft, use Add position to attach the seats being contested. Positions can only be changed in Draft; once you move past it they are locked.
3. Move the election through its stages with Change status: Draft → Nomination Open → Nomination Closed → Candidate Approval → Voting Scheduled → Voting Open → Voting Closed → Results Pending Approval → Results Published → Completed (or Cancelled at any point).
4. During Nomination Open, candidates are added with Nominate and approved individually with Approve — only a Pending nomination can be approved.
5. Before voting, select Generate voter roll. Voting itself only accepts votes while the election status is exactly Voting Open; a staff member can cast a vote on a learner's behalf from Staff Vote.
6. After voting closes, select Tally to calculate turnout and results, Approve result per contested seat, then Publish and Appoint winner — the last step creates the actual leadership assignment and dispatches the appointment notice.

Handling a counselling referral through to a closed case

1. A referral is raised from Counselling → Referrals with New referral, starting in Pending status.
2. The counselling office Accepts or Rejects it — only a Pending referral can be accepted; a Pending or Accepted referral can be rejected, but rejecting requires a reason. Once Rejected or Closed, a referral cannot be reopened.
3. An accepted referral becomes a Case (Counselling → Cases → New case, optionally pre-filled from the referral). Sessions are logged against the case with Add session, and intervention plans with Add plan.
4. A case can be put On Hold (only from Open/In Progress) and later Resumed (only from On Hold, which returns it to In Progress).
5. Close the case with an outcome summary once the matter is settled. Closing a case automatically cancels any of its intervention plans that are still in Draft.

Logging a clinic visit

1. Open Clinic → Visits → New visit, find the patient profile (a learner or staff member already registered in Clinic → Patients), and save to open the visit record.
2. On the visit's Details page, add vitals, symptoms and diagnoses as they are recorded.
3. To dispense medication, Add dispense — this only stages the item against the visit and does not touch stock. Select Post dispensing separately to actually decrement store stock; only staged dispenses can be removed before posting.
4. Close the visit once treatment is complete, or Cancel it if it should not stand. Both are final — a visit that is already Completed or Cancelled cannot be reopened, and closing one sends a courtesy notice to the learner's guardians where they are registered.

Vitals, symptoms, diagnoses and dispensing can only be added while a visit is open or in progress — the controller checks the visit's own status before accepting any of them.

Allocating and managing hostel accommodation

1. Open Hostel → Allocations → Allocate, search for the student, then pick from the beds the system reports as available for the chosen house and boarding status.
2. Saving raises the allocation — if it lands in the pending state it needs Approve (a separate permission from creating one) before it counts as active; approving or an allocation that is auto-approved on save both trigger hostel billing for that student.
3. From an active allocation's Detail page you can Transfer the student to another bed, Suspend and later Reinstate them, or Vacate the bed — each action is only offered when the allocation is in the matching status (the page hides the buttons that do not apply).
4. For overnight or weekend absence, raise a Hostel Leave Request; it needs Approve before a Gate pass can be issued, and Record return closes the loop when the learner is back.

Running canteen enrolment and meal service

1. Set the daily and weekly price plan and the school-day pattern once, under Canteen → Settings. A new price plan takes effect from the date you give it; earlier prices remain in history rather than being overwritten.
2. Enrol a learner with Daily Booking or Weekly Subscription, or use Bulk Weekly to preview and confirm a whole class or group at once.
3. Record payments from Payment; a receipt PDF is produced immediately. Whether an account with an outstanding balance can still book a meal is controlled by the Allow service with outstanding balance setting.
4. At mealtime, use Serve to look up the learner by name or student number; the page checks same-day eligibility before the meal can be marked served. A wrongly served meal is undone with Reverse rather than deleted.

Generating bills for a class

1. Open Billing → Generate Bills (/BillingGeneration).
2. Choose the academic year and term, then optionally a class or a fee group. Leaving the class blank bills every class.
3. Select Preview. The preview lists each learner with gross, discount, waiver and net, and the totals across the top.
4. Check the Class column. Every row should show the class you filtered on. Learners are selected by their effective class — their current class assignment, or the most recent class history entry, or failing both their admission class — which is the same rule that decides the class a bill is priced under.
5. Choose Save as Draft or Post, then select Generate n Bill(s).

Running the same class twice does not double-bill. A learner who already has a bill for that term is reported as skipped and left untouched.

Finding out why a learner was not billed

1. Open Reports → Class Billing Summary, or Terms → Details and look at the Auto Billing Runs table.
2. Compare Enrolled with Billed Students. Billed Students can never exceed Enrolled — both are counted over the same roster — so any difference is a genuine coverage gap.
3. Select Coverage on the class row. The coverage page lists every learner attached to that class for the term and says, for each one, whether they were billed and if not, why.
4. Read the reason. A failed billing attempt shows the error the run actually recorded, word for word. A lifecycle exclusion names the learner's real status. If nothing can be determined the page says "reason not recorded" and gives you the batch reference to chase, rather than guessing.

Reading the Class Billing Summary

1. The report defaults to the current term. Use the Term filter to change it, or choose All terms for the cumulative picture.
2. Enrolled counts learners currently in the class. Billed Students counts how many of them have an active bill this term.
3. Amount Billed, Collected and Outstanding are attributed to the class the bill was priced under. A learner billed before changing class therefore contributes money to their former class and headcount to their current one.

Recording a payment

1. Open Billing → Student Payments and select New payment.
2. Find the learner, then enter the collection account, payment mode and amount received.
3. Save. The payment reduces the outstanding balance on the learner's bill and appears in collection reports and on the dashboard's monthly collections figure.

Creating and posting a general journal

1. Open Accounting → Journals → New journal and choose the journal type, date and period, then add lines with an account, a description and either a debit or a credit.
2. Save. The journal is created as a Draft and does not affect any balance yet.
3. Open the journal and select Post. Posting is refused, with the reason shown, if the journal is not still a Draft, if its accounting period or fiscal year is not open, or if total debits do not equal total credits.
4. A posted journal cannot be edited or deleted. To undo one, use Reverse and choose an open period to reverse it into — this creates a new, opposite journal linked back to the original rather than altering it.

Recording and paying a vendor invoice

1. Open Accounting → Accounts Payable → Payables and select New vendor invoice. Choose the vendor, date, period and line items.
2. Saving creates the invoice as a Draft together with its own draft journal. Select Post to move both the invoice and its journal to Posted — only a Draft invoice can be posted.
3. To settle it, use Pay: choose the bank account, payment date, period and amount. The amount cannot exceed the invoice's outstanding balance (total minus what has already been paid), the period must be open, and a Draft or Cancelled invoice cannot be paid at all.
4. A payment posts its own journal crediting the bank/cash side and debiting accounts payable (or the vendor's own GL account where one is configured).

Running fixed-asset depreciation

1. Register the asset under Accounting → Assets → Fixed Assets → New asset, giving its acquisition cost, salvage value and useful life in months.
2. From the asset's Details page, select Run depreciation and choose the period. The system calculates straight-line monthly depreciation and will not let you run the same asset twice for the same period.
3. Where the asset's category has depreciation and accumulated-depreciation GL accounts configured, the run also posts a balanced journal automatically; if the category has no GL accounts set up, the depreciation entry is recorded without a journal.
4. When the accumulated depreciation brings the book value down to the salvage value, the asset is marked Fully Depreciated automatically. Depreciation can only be run against a currently Active asset.
5. Use Dispose asset when the item is sold, scrapped or written off.

Recording a cash receipt or payment

1. Open Accounting → Cash Book, choose the bank account, then select New receipt or New payment.
2. Give the date, period, amount and the account on the other side of the entry, then save. Each posts its own journal against the selected bank account.

Building and approving a budget

1. Open Accounting → Budgets → New budget, choose the fiscal year and enter the line-by-line allocations.
2. Saving creates the budget for review. Select Approve on the Budget Details page once it is ready to be worked against.
3. Bank Reconciliation, under the same area, is where a bank statement is matched against the cash book entries for a bank account.

Reading the Receivables view

Accounting → Receivables is a read-only, permission-gated summary of outstanding student balances by term — it does not post anything itself. Student-level billing and payment recording live in the Billing and Payments chapter; this view exists to give the accounting side of the house the same figures without duplicating the billing ledger.

Submitting and paying a staff expense claim

1. Open Accounting → Expenses → New expense, choose the category, amount and date, and attach supporting documents if needed.
2. Select Submit to send the claim for approval. An approver uses Approve or Reject from the Details page; every action is written to the expense's own approval history with its remarks.
3. An approved expense is settled with Pay — bank account, payment method, period and reference are required, and the payment posts its own journal.
4. Cancel is available before payment; Reverse is the equivalent action after payment, and both require a reason and a target date/period rather than simply deleting the claim.

Categories and vendors used across expenses and accounts payable are maintained from Expenses → Categories and Expenses → Vendors respectively.

Setting up an employee record

1. Open HR → Employees → New employee and complete personal, contact and employment details. Department and designation come from Payroll Setup → Departments and Designations; the designation list narrows to the ones that belong to the department you pick.
2. From the employee's Details page, add Bank Detail (mark one Primary for salary payment), Documents, and the employee's Salary Structure — allowances and deductions are attached the same way, each from its own tab.
3. Use Deactivate to take a leaver off the active roster and Reactivate to bring someone back; deactivating does not delete any of the employee's history.
4. Transfer moves the employee to a different department or designation from a given date, keeping the change on record rather than silently overwriting the old one.

Requesting and approving staff leave

1. From the employee's Leave tab, select Add leave request, choose the leave type and dates, and save.
2. Approve (Leave Manage permission) checks the employee's leave balance for that type and year first — if the closing balance is less than the days requested, approval is refused with that reason rather than going through anyway. Approving deducts the days from the balance immediately.
3. Reject records the remarks given and leaves the balance untouched.

Leave balances are opening balance plus accrued days minus used days, tracked per employee, per leave type, per year. Leave types themselves are configured in Payroll Setup → Leave Types.

Configuring statutory settings before the first payroll run

1. Open Payroll Setup → Statutory Settings. Either apply a country statutory template with Apply Template (Ghana's GH-STAT set, for example) or build a Statutory Profile by hand with its own tax bands and rules.
2. Tax bands and rules are added and edited individually under the profile — each has its own Create/Edit/Delete actions, so a rate change is a new band rather than an in-place edit of history.
3. Allowance types, deduction types and employment types used across the module are all maintained from the same Payroll Setup screen.

Running a payroll period

1. Open HR → Payroll Processing, choose the payroll period and select Preview. The preview computes gross pay, allowances, deductions and tax for every active employee (tick Include inactive to sweep in anyone deactivated mid-period) without writing anything.
2. Select Process to commit the run. This creates the Payroll Run and its per-employee figures.
3. From the run's Details page, Approve moves both the run and its payroll period to Approved. Post then moves it to Posted, closes the payroll period, and emails every employee with an address on file that their payslip is available.
4. Reset cancels a run and reopens it for reprocessing — but only before it has been Posted. A Cancelled run cannot be approved or posted, and a Posted run cannot be reset.

Producing the GRA (statutory) report for a run

1. Open Payroll GRA Reports, find the payroll run, and open its report — one is generated per posted run and flagged current.
2. The report lists validation issues and employees missing a TIN before you file, so these are worth clearing first where possible.
3. Select Regenerate if figures on the underlying run change; this creates a new version rather than editing the existing one, so earlier filings remain intact.
4. Export with Export CSV or Export Excel for submission.

Payroll Reports (payslips, summaries and department/cost-centre breakdowns) and Payroll GRA Reports are both read against posted runs; figures for a run still in Draft or Approved will not yet reflect what was ultimately posted if it changes before posting.

Setting up the store before recording movements

1. Open Store → Categories and Units of Measure to define how items are classified and counted, then Locations for the physical stores or stockrooms in use.
2. Register stock items under Store → Items, each tied to a category and a unit of measure.

Requesting stock: requisition, approval, issue

1. Raise a Store Requisition as a Draft and add its lines, then select Submit. Submitting is refused if the requisition still has no lines, and only a Draft requisition can be submitted.
2. An approver opens the submitted requisition and either Approves it — setting an approved quantity per line, which is capped automatically at the quantity requested — or Rejects it with a reason. Only a Submitted requisition can be approved or rejected, and approval requires at least one line with a positive approved quantity.
3. Once approved, open Store Issues → New issue against the requisition (or start one standalone) to actually move stock out. Select Post to write the issue to the stock ledger — the underlying workflow service refuses to post an issue that is not in a postable state, and the reason is shown on screen rather than a raw error.
4. Cancel is available in place of posting for an issue that should not proceed.

Receiving stock into a location

1. Open Store Receipts → New receipt, choose the location and item lines, and save as a Draft.
2. Select Post to commit the receipt to stock on hand. Cancel discards a receipt that should not be posted.

Transferring stock between locations

1. Open Store Transfers → New transfer, choose the source and destination locations and the items, and save.
2. Select Send to move the stock out of the source location, then Receive at the destination to complete the transfer. The two-step Send/Receive split means stock in transit is accounted for rather than disappearing from the source and appearing at the destination in the same instant.
3. Cancel is available before the transfer is complete.

Adjusting stock (write-offs, counts, corrections)

1. Open Store Adjustments → New adjustment, record the item, location, quantity and reason, and save as a Draft.
2. Select Approve — this only readies the adjustment; it does not touch stock on its own.
3. Select Post to actually apply the adjustment to the stock ledger. Cancel is available in place of either step for an adjustment that should not proceed.

Returns and reporting

1. Store Returns follows the same Draft → Post/Cancel shape as receipts, for stock coming back into a location.
2. Store Reports covers Stock on Hand, Movement History, Low Stock and Valuation, each with an Excel export, plus Expiring Soon for perishable or dated stock within a configurable window of days.

Setting up the building blocks

1. Open Timetable → Setup → Rooms and register the physical rooms available for scheduling.
2. Define the school's Periods (the time slots in a day) and Day Templates (which periods apply on which kind of day) — a day template is built from Add template period entries, each of which can be removed individually.
3. Assign day templates to actual calendar days with Save day assignment, so the generator knows which template governs a given date.

Teacher availability windows and per-class/subject period requirements are configured separately (Timetable Availability and Timetable Requirements, in the Other Modules chapter) and both feed the generator described below.

Generating a term's timetable

1. Open Timetable → Generations and select Run, choosing the term. You must be working within a specific school — the action is refused if no school context is selected, since a timetable is generated one school at a time.
2. Generation runs as a background job: the request is queued immediately with status Queued, then moves to Running and finally Completed (or a failed status) once the job picks it up. Reload the Details page to see progress — nothing here happens synchronously in the request.
3. Only a Completed generation can be Activated. Activating one automatically deactivates whichever other generation was previously active for that term, and locks the newly active one against deletion.
4. Deactivate is only offered on a generation that is currently active. Toggle lock can protect any other generation from deletion, but an active generation cannot be unlocked without deactivating it first.
5. Delete is refused for anything active, locked, queued or still running — only a finished, inactive, unlocked generation can be removed.

Reading the timetable reports

1. Timetable → Reports → Teacher Load shows each teacher's assigned periods against their configured availability, with an Excel export.
2. Room Utilisation shows how heavily each room is booked across the week.
3. Coverage Gaps lists periods that the generator could not fill — a class/subject requirement with no teacher or room available for it — so this is the first place to check when a generation completes but the result looks incomplete.

Cataloguing before you can lend anything

1. Configure Branches, Categories, Shelves, Authors and Publishers under Library — each has its own settings page with a Save action.
2. Add the title itself under Catalog → New book, then add its physical copies from the book's Details page with Save copy. A copy marked Reference-only can never be issued — the issuing screen refuses it outright.
3. Set the loan period, renewal limits, overdue fine rate and grace period once under Settings, and whether members with overdue items are blocked from borrowing further.

Enrolling a member

1. From a learner's record use Create student member, or from a staff record Create employee member, to open a library membership.
2. Update contact and status details from the member's own page with Update member.

Issuing, renewing and returning a book

1. Open Library → Issue Books, choose the book copy and the member, and confirm. Issuing is refused, with the specific reason shown, if the copy is not available, is reference-only, is currently reserved for someone else, or if the title is inactive.
2. It is also refused if the member has overdue items and the school has overdue-blocking switched on, if their outstanding fines exceed the configured threshold, or if they are already at their active-issue limit.
3. Use Renew from the same screen to extend a loan. Renewal is refused if the issue is already overdue (it must be returned first), if it has reached its renewal limit, or if another member has an active reservation on the title.
4. Process the physical hand-back from Returns with Return book. If the item comes back late, the return calculates and displays the fine assessed at that moment.
5. Where a copy is lost or damaged rather than returned, use Mark lost or Mark damaged from the issue instead — an issue that has already been returned cannot be marked either way.

Reservations and fines

1. A reservation can only be placed on a title with no available copies — if a copy is free, the system expects you to issue it directly rather than reserve it. Each member is limited to one active reservation per title and to the school's overall reservation limit.
2. Outstanding balances are managed from Fines: Record fine payment takes a payment against the balance (capped at what is owed), and Create manual fine raises a fine outside the automatic overdue calculation, for damage or loss.

Digital resources

1. Add an e-book, document or media item under Digital Library → New resource, including any access restrictions.
2. Members open it with Open resource or pull a copy with Download, subject to the Digital Resources Download permission.

Reporting

Library Reports covers the catalogue, issued and overdue books, returns, fine collections, member borrowing history, popular titles, digital-resource access and a stock inventory — each with a screen view and a separate permission-gated PDF export.

Finding a report

1. Open Reports from the sidebar. The landing page groups reports by area — enrolment and admissions, attendance and academics, finance, staff, and discipline/incidents — with roughly forty individual reports across the module.
2. Each report opens with its own filters (class, term, subject, date range, and so on as relevant) and a results view. Where a permission-gated PDF, Excel, Word or CSV export exists on that report it appears next to the filters — the export always needs the separate Reports Export permission, so a user can be able to view a report on screen without being able to extract it.

Reports read the same underlying figures as their owning modules rather than a separate copy — the Class Billing Summary here is the same report referenced in the Billing and Payments chapter, for example. None of the reports in this module post or change data; they are read-only by design.

Reading the GES Executive Dashboard

1. Open GES Dashboard for the national/consolidated overview: enrolment, attendance, academic performance, finance, staff, welfare, discipline, clinic, HR, compliance, communication and system usage each have their own tab, gated by their own permission.
2. Apply a filter (region, district, school, term and so on, depending on your scope) and select Save preset to keep it for next time rather than re-entering it on every visit.
3. Export produces the consolidated figures for the currently selected filter and tab; it needs its own export permission separate from viewing the dashboard.
4. Data Quality flags gaps and inconsistencies in the underlying data — missing fields, stale records and the like — that would otherwise silently understate a figure elsewhere on the dashboard.

Drafting and sending a broadcast

1. Open Communication → Broadcasts → New broadcast, optionally starting from a saved template. Choose the audience, channel and message body.
2. Select Preview at any point to see how the message and recipient count resolve without saving. Select Save draft to keep it as a Draft (or, if you gave it a schedule, as Scheduled) for later.
3. Select Send — either directly from the editor or from the broadcast's Details page — to dispatch it now. Sending needs the separate Broadcasts Send permission: a user who can only create broadcasts will have their attempt to send from the editor refused, even though they can still save the draft.
4. Once sending starts the broadcast moves to Sending and finishes as Sent or, if only some recipients could be reached, Partially Sent — the Details page's delivery log shows the outcome and any error per recipient.
5. Cancel is only available while the broadcast is still Draft or Scheduled; a broadcast that is Sending, Sent, Partially Sent or already Cancelled cannot be cancelled or re-sent from here.

Reusable message layouts live under Templates, gated by the Broadcasts Manage Templates permission — starting a new broadcast from a template only pre-fills the editor; it does not link the broadcast back to the template afterwards.

Dedicated Email Settings and Email Templates controllers do not exist as separate screens in this codebase. The equivalent functionality — SMTP configuration, sending a test email or SMS, editing notification email templates, per-category notification preferences, and the delivery queue with its Retry and Cancel actions — lives under Notifications → Settings / Templates / Queue, which the manual lists in the Getting Started section rather than here, because that is the controller that actually owns those pages.

Creating a user and setting their access

1. Open Administration → Users → New user, complete their details and set an initial password.
2. Assign one or more roles from the same form. A user's effective permissions are the union of everything their roles carry — permissions are never granted to a user directly outside of a role.
3. Use Reset password from the user's Details page when they are locked out or need a new one issued; this also clears their failed-login count and lockout, and it emails the new password to the user directly, so treat it as an action taken on their behalf rather than something you keep yourself. Tick Must change password to force them to set their own on next sign-in.
4. Unlock clears a lockout caused by repeated failed sign-in attempts without touching the password itself.
5. A Super Admin manages which schools a user can access from Manage tenant access, using Assign tenant and Remove tenant — this tier is Super Admin only and separate from the roles/permissions system below it.

Building a role

1. Open Administration → Roles → New role, or start from an existing role as a template — the new role is offered a unique name automatically (for example "Class Teacher Copy") and starts with the template's permission set already ticked, which you can then adjust.
2. Tick the permissions the role should carry. Permission editing itself is only available to a user who can manage permissions; someone with Roles Manage but not permission-editing rights can rename a role or change its description but not touch its permission list.
3. Compare Templates lists every built-in role template side by side with its permissions, useful for deciding which one to start a new role from.
4. A GES-restricted administrator cannot open a role for editing if it carries any GES-scoped permission — that edit is refused outright rather than silently stripping the GES permissions.

Application Permissions is a read-only reference listing every permission code in the system and what it gates — useful when deciding what a role needs, but nothing is editable there.

Reading the audit trail

1. Open Administration → Audit Trail. Every write action across the system that calls the audit recorder — user, role, tenant, payroll, billing, store and more — lands here with who did it, when, and (where the action captured it) the before/after values.
2. Select a row's Details to see the full event, including its category, severity and any linked subjects (for example, both a leave request and the employee it belongs to).
3. Export PDF is a separate permission from viewing the trail.

Running and scheduling background services

1. Open Administration → Background Services for the school (or, as Super Admin, pick the tenant). Each row is one scheduled job — billing runs, notification sweeps, migrations and the like — with its current status and next run time.
2. Enable and Disable switch a service on or off without changing its schedule. Update schedule changes how often it runs.
3. Trigger now runs the service immediately, outside its schedule — useful for confirming a fix without waiting for the next scheduled window.

Schools versus Tenants — two different levels

1. Administration → Schools manages the branches or campuses that exist inside your own tenant — each with its own contact details and community. Any user with the Settings Manage permission for their school can maintain this list.
2. Tenants, by contrast, is the platform level: each tenant is a separate customer/school account entirely, and this screen is Super Admin only. Toggle status deactivates a tenant outright — every Super Admin is notified when a tenant's status flips, since this is treated as a critical action.

Approving a demo or pilot request

1. Open Demo Requests and select a Pending request's Details.
2. Approve asks for the institution name and subdomain, checks the subdomain is not already taken, then provisions a brand-new tenant and its administrator account. A request already Provisioned or with credentials sent cannot be approved again, and a Rejected request cannot be approved at all.
3. If provisioning fails partway, the request is marked Failed with the reason recorded rather than left in limbo; you can correct the problem and approve again.
4. Once the tenant exists, a one-time credentials email is sent to the contact automatically and the request moves to Credentials Sent. Reject is available instead of approving, and is final.

System Info

Administration → System Info is a read-only diagnostics page (application version, environment, and similar operational facts) gated by the Settings View permission; it does not change any configuration.

These screens belong to the platform operator, not to a school. They are visible only to a Super Admin holding the platform billing permissions.

Billing a school immediately

1. Open Platform Billing from the sidebar (/PlatformBilling).
2. Use the Generate a bill now panel at the top. Choose the school and the term.
3. Select Generate Now. The bill is raised against the school's current active student count at the per-student rate configured for that school, the recipients on its billing list are notified by email and SMS, and you land on the new bill.
4. The action is safe to repeat. If a bill already exists for that school and term you are told its number and taken to it; a unique constraint prevents a duplicate.

Printing a bill

1. From the bills list, select PDF on the row to open the invoice directly, or View (or the bill number) to open the bill first and use Report there.
2. The PDF opens in a new tab and can be printed or saved like any document.
3. A school can print its own invoice from Platform Bills in its sidebar, without you sending it.

Recording a payment, resending or cancelling

1. Open the bill with View.
2. Record payment takes the amount, method and reference; it appears once the bill still carries a balance.
3. Resend notification re-sends to the school's billing recipients and logs the attempt.
4. Cancel requires a reason, which is stored with the bill.

Rates and recipients

1. Select Billing settings from the bills list.
2. The global per-student rate applies to every school that has no override of its own.
3. A school-specific configuration overrides the rate, payment terms and billing recipients for that school alone.
4. The rate is captured onto each bill at the moment it is generated. Changing a rate does not restate bills already raised — those keep the rate they were issued at until cancelled and reissued.

This chapter covers screens whose controller does not fall neatly under one of the named modules above. Several belong functionally to Student Life, Billing, HR/Payroll, Store or Timetable but are grouped here because of how the manual's page inventory is built; where that is the case, the workflow is cross-referenced to its natural chapter rather than repeated.

Posting draft bills to the ledger

1. Open Draft Bill Posting. It lists every draft bill with an up-front verdict on whether it is ready to post — a school must be selected first, since bills post into one school's ledger and the screen refuses to run without one.
2. If the required GL setup (journal type, receivable control account) is missing, the page shows the exact blockers and Post Selected is disabled until they are fixed — this avoids one exception per bill.
3. Tick the bills to post and select Post Selected. A single run posts at most 250 bills; if you select more, the rest are reported as skipped with instructions to run again. If an early bill fails, the run stops rather than pushing on and leaving a partial, hard-to-audit result.
4. Legacy admission-era drafts that were stored in an old amount shape can be fixed with Normalize legacy drafts — this only rewrites the amount and revenue-account fields on the bill; it never posts anything itself. Review the normalized rows and post them as a separate, deliberate step.

Reviewing a guardian's self-reported payment

1. A guardian records a payment they made outside the system from their own portal (Guardian → Make Payment), which creates a submission awaiting review rather than a posted payment.
2. Staff review it from Guardian Payment Submissions. Approve posts the actual receipt against the student's bill and returns its receipt number. Reject declines it outright. Request Clarification sends it back to the guardian with a note instead of closing it either way.
3. Every outcome notifies the guardian automatically with the note the reviewer entered.

Student Fees is the read-only per-student ledger view behind this and the wider billing module — see the Billing and Payments chapter for generating and correcting bills themselves; Class Fee Groups is where a class is linked to the fee groups it should be billed under, maintained from Billing setup.

Counting physical stock (stocktake)

1. Open Store Stocktake and select Start for a location. This creates a stock-adjustment record of type Stocktake in Draft.
2. It follows the same Approve → Post pattern as any other store adjustment (see the Store and Inventory chapter) — record the counted quantities, approve, then post to apply the variance to stock on hand.

Payslips and payroll periods

1. Payroll Periods defines the periods a payroll run is processed against — create, edit or delete a period before it has been used.
2. Payslips lists every employee's payslip once a payroll run exists; Print and Batch Print produce individual or whole-run PDFs. Update payment status needs the Payroll Approve permission, separate from viewing payslips.

School-year housekeeping: holidays and lookups

1. Holidays maintains the calendar dates that attendance and timetable generation both treat as non-school days.
2. Lookup Settings is the catch-all editor for the smaller reference lists used across the system (each tab is its own table) — viewing needs Settings View, editing needs Settings Manage.
3. SMS Pendings shows outbound SMS messages still queued for delivery, for diagnosing why a text has not gone out.

Platform-level reference data and provisioning (Super Admin)

1. Regions maintains the region/district reference data used across GES scoping and demo provisioning — regions and districts can be added and individually toggled active or inactive.
2. Tenant Templates holds the reusable school-structure, fee and chart-of-accounts templates offered when approving a demo request (see Administration and Security); each template is versioned — Clone starts a new version from an old one rather than editing history, and Toggle Status retires a version without deleting it.
3. Super Admin itself carries the highest-privilege actions in the system: Promote and Demote a user's Super Admin status, and Change Tenant / Reverse Tenant Change for moving a user's home tenant — each behind its own named policy, not the general Users Manage permission.
4. GES User Scope is where a Super Admin restricts a GES-facing user to a specific region or district for the GES Dashboard (see Reports and Analytics) — Deactivate and Reactivate suspend or restore a scope without deleting the record; Delete removes it outright.
5. Dashboard Config lets a school customise which widgets appear on its own landing dashboard.

Screens documented elsewhere

Hostel Allocations, Hostel Discipline, Hostel Beds, Hostel Rooms, Hostel Maintenance and Hostel Roll Call; Clinic Patients and Clinic Visits; and Counselling Cases, Sessions, Referrals, Plans, Profiles and Recommendations are all part of the day-to-day Hostel, Clinic and Counselling workflows described in the Student Life chapter. Timetable Availability, Timetable Requirements, Timetable Schedule and Timetable Substitutes feed and display the generated timetable described in the Timetable chapter — Availability and Requirements are the inputs the generator reads, Schedule is where class/teacher/room views and their PDFs are produced, and Substitutes covers finding and recording cover for an absent teacher's slot. Tenant Selection is the screen behind "Choosing a school" in Getting Started, and Demo Request is the public-facing form a prospective school fills in, which becomes the request an administrator later approves in Administration and Security.