The dashboards are the first screen of the administration portal and the last one you should need to leave. They exist to answer one question quickly: is there anything about today that needs a person? Enrolments up or down, marks missing on a subject, an instalment overdue, a mobile money transfer stuck — the cards are built so that anything unusual stands out before you open a single register.

They are read-only. Nothing on a dashboard is typed: the enrolment total is the number of learner files you created, the tuition figure is the sum of the payments the counter recorded, the store revenue is what the shop actually sold, and the AI credit balance is what the teachers actually spent. That is deliberate — it means a dashboard figure and the screen it came from can never disagree.

All six dashboards share the same period selector at the top. Choose Today, Week, Month or Custom and every card, chart and table below recalculates for that window, each one showing its own comparison with the previous period of the same length. A percentage that reads +40 % next to a card tells you the change, not the level, so always read the figure underneath it.

Today, Week, Month, Custom

The selector is identical on all six dashboards, so “this week” means the same thing wherever you read it. Today is the useful one on a Monday morning — it shows the payments taken so far and the sessions logged. Week is the natural unit for timetables, submissions and broadcasts. Month is the unit the bursar closes on. Custom lets you type any two dates, which is what you want when a board or an inspector asks for a fixed window such as 1 September to 30 November.

Every card carries its own comparison

Each figure is shown against the previous period of the same length, so Month compares this month with last month and Week compares this week with last week. A school in a growth year will show a large positive change on new registrations and a small one on completed courses — that is the real shape of a school year, and it is why reading a single number without its comparison is misleading.

Switch dashboards without losing the period

The tab row and the period selector sit together at the top of the page, so moving from Overview to Finance & Billing keeps the window you chose. Compare the same period across dashboards before drawing a conclusion: an enrolment jump on the overview and a matching jump in validated store orders usually means a promotional campaign, not a new school year.

Overview: what the school looks like today

Student body counts learners enrolled in the period, with the completed courses and the active learners beside it — active meaning enrolled, or having completed a lesson, submitted work or attempted a quiz. Teachers and classes counts the teachers actually on a timetable in the window and the classes they teach, so it goes down in the holidays without anyone leaving. Financial snapshot only appears for roles that may see money, and splits tuition from store sales on purpose. Admissions pacing shows how many applications arrived, how many are still pending review, how many were approved and how many turned into an actual enrolment.

Finance & Billing: the month in one screen

Read tuition collected against the percentage of the target, where the target is the sum of your active fee structures for the year. Then read the arrears card: what is still outstanding, how many instalments fall due within thirty days, and how many are already overdue. The wallet card is the store balance that will be transferred to your mobile money number — it is deliberately a different figure from the tuition collected. Installment status breaks the same picture down class by class, which is the fastest way to find the class the bursar should call first.

Academic & Teaching: whether teaching actually happened

The compliance bars compare logbook sessions that were logged on time, logged late, and never logged at all. A rising “missing” band is not a data problem: it is a teacher who has stopped filling the logbook, and it will show up in the next payroll run. Results mix counts the submitted marks by band — Distinction, Merit, Pass, Needs Improvement — for the period, which is the quickest honest read on a class before the reports go out.

Ungraded, unpublished, orders, Form B, logbooks

Alongside the figures, the Overview carries an action centre with five counters: work that has not been corrected yet, corrections that have not been published to learners, store orders waiting to be validated or cancelled, Form B applications still pending, and logbook sessions that have not been verified. Each counter is a queue, and each queue has one screen behind it. Click the counter, work the top of the list, and the counter goes down on its own.

Why an unattended queue is expensive

Corrections that sit unpublished are work a teacher has already done for nothing: the learner sees nothing until the results are released. Unverified logbooks become a payroll problem at month end, because the wage run is calculated from verified teaching hours. Orders left in processing or paid hold money in escrow that cannot be transferred to you. None of these are alarming once they are visible — which is exactly what this section is for.

Use it as a morning list

The honest daily routine is short: open Dashboard > Overview, read the action centre, empty the smallest of the five counters, then pick the largest. A school that does this daily never has a term-end scramble, because nothing was allowed to pile up while it was still small.