Admissions is the front door of the school. It receives the applications that arrive through your public site, it is where a secretary decides which files are complete, and it is where an accepted applicant becomes a learner with a matricule, a class and a fee record. The three screens it uses do exactly those three jobs and nothing else.

Admission Forms decides what a parent has to fill in. You build the questions yourself — name, date of birth, phone, previous school, the documents you want scanned — group them, set the dates the form is open, and point it at the classes you are admitting to. Applications is the queue of files that came back. You open one, read the answers, ask for a correction on the exact field that is wrong, and approve or reject. Enrollments is the register itself: walk-ins typed in at the counter, and the approved applications turned into a learner file.

Two people normally share this menu. The secretary works the queue and registers the walk-ins. The head of school takes the decisions on the applications. A bursar sees only Enrollments, because that is where the fees are taken. Admission Forms and Applications are not opened for a bursar, and neither is any of this menu opened for a teacher.

Ask for what you will use

Open Admissions > Admission Forms, click New form, and give it a title your parents will recognise. Then add questions with Add question. The field types on offer are the practical ones: Short text, Paragraph, Single choice, Multiple choice, Dropdown, Date, Phone, Email, Single file and Multiple files. Group related questions together so the applicant sees a short, sensible form rather than thirty rows.

Mark the required ones and set the window

Tick Required on the fields a file cannot be reviewed without — a name, a date of birth, a phone number. Leave the rest optional, because every mandatory box is a reason for a parent to abandon the form. Then set Opens at and Closes at: a form with no closing date stays open all year and quietly collects applications for a class you are not admitting to. Choose the Academic year and the Class / group the form is for, then switch Published on.

Map the answers you will really use

Some answers can be sent straight to the student record rather than left as text in the file. The Student / enrollment field mapping is where a name, a date of birth, a phone number or a requested class is connected to the field it belongs to. Anything you map becomes part of the learner’s record when the application is approved, which saves the secretary retyping at the counter.

Scans, not photocopies

For the file types that accept documents, set Accepted file types and Max size so a parent is refused a ten-megabyte photograph instead of discovering the problem after twenty minutes of typing. The screen shows the accepted formats and the maximum size under the field, so state them in your own public instructions too.

Read the file, not the family

Admissions > Applications lists every submitted file with the applicant name, the applicant ID, the form it came from, the academic year, the phone and email, and the date. Search by applicant name or applicant ID before you open anything. Opening a file shows Submitted answers — every question as the applicant answered it — plus the Activity trail of who touched it and when.

Ask for a correction instead of refusing

Most incomplete files are incomplete by accident: a date typed as 05/07, a phone number missing a digit, a birth certificate scan too dark to read. Choose the answer that is wrong and ask for it to be provided again, or ask for additional information. The applicant is told exactly which field to fix and can send the updated answers back, and the file stays in the queue instead of being lost. Only refuse a file that should not be admitted — and write the reason in the remarks, because the applicant can read it.

Approve, then register

Save your decision with Save decision. An approved application can then be turned into an enrolment from the same screen, and the answers you mapped flow into the learner’s record. If you prefer to register at the counter instead, approve first and use the View learner link to open the file.

Registering a walk-in

In Admissions > Enrollments, register the learner: name, date of birth, parent and phone, then the academic year and the class. The moment the enrolment is saved, the fee structure attached to that class supplies the Expected amount and copies it into the learner’s file — which is why you should create the fee structure for a class before you enrol into it. Open the learner, take the first payment against the first instalment, and print the receipt before the family leaves the desk. The Fee Status chip in the list turns from pending to cleared on its own once paid and expected meet.