Onboarding is the guided checklist that turns an empty Ekati account into a working school. It asks six things — do you have an academic year, classes, courses, staff, fee structures and branding — and it shows you exactly which of the six are missing. The card sits on your dashboard under the heading Get started with Ekati, with a progress figure beside it, and every step links straight to the screen where the work is done.

Whoever owns the school usually walks it: the head of school or the proprietor, with the secretary and the bursar supplying the details for their own steps. A school that has been running for years opens the same screen and finds most steps already ticked, which is a useful way to confirm nothing was forgotten.

The important thing about this list is what it is not. Nothing is locked. You can leave the wizard at any step, come back a month later, and the figures you entered are still there. The checklist measures how ready a school is; it never blocks it.

A year first, because everything is dated

Fees, timetables, assignments, report slips, logbook entries and the payroll itself all belong to an academic year or one of its terms. Create it before anything else and every later screen offers you the right dates to choose from. Create it last and you will be setting a fee structure for a year that does not exist yet.

Classes before courses, because a course teaches a class

A course is attached to a class. Without classes open, a course has nothing to attach to and no learner will ever meet it. Open First Year and Second Year first and the course list immediately becomes a list of things you actually teach.

Courses before fees, because fees are per class and year

A fee structure names a class and an academic year. Neither is available until steps one and two are done — which is why the fee screen stays empty on a new school rather than offering a dropdown with nothing in it.

Staff after courses, because workload points at courses

You cannot assign a teacher to a course that has not been created. Registering staff before the courses exist means going back to every profile afterwards to attach the teaching load, which is the slowest way to do it.

Branding last, because it is the only step nothing depends on

Configurations can be done at any time — but doing it last means the logo and the description are written once the school’s own name, its classes and its courses are settled, which is when you actually know what you want to say.

One real record marks a step complete

Each step turns itself green as soon as the school has its first record in that area: one academic year, one class, one course, one member of staff, one fee structure, one branding field. The card also shows you the number it found — one record, three records — so you can tell at a glance whether a step is genuinely started or whether it exists on paper and nowhere else.

Fee structures need instalments to count

The fee step is the only one that checks something more than existence: a grid with no instalments does not count, because a total with no collection plan cannot be enrolled against or collected. Add the instalments and the step completes.

Any branding content at all counts

A logo, a cover image, a watermark, a footer message or the About description will each mark the configurations step done on their own. You do not have to fill the whole tab to move on, though a school that intends to print receipts will want the logo and the footer before its first collection.

The progress figure is a percentage of six

The number on the dashboard is simply how many of the six are done. Four out of six means sixty-seven per cent, and the remaining two are named on the card — so it is never a matter of guessing what is still missing.

You can skip, and come back a year later

Every step can be left part-done and every one of them can be finished whenever the school is ready. The screen says so on the card itself. Nothing about your school’s ability to work changes because a step is unfinished — you can create a class without having priced it, and a teacher can log hours before any fee structure exists.

Coming back later is normal, not a failure

A school that installs Ekati in the middle of a term has no time to price six classes. Open the wizard at the end of the year, or finish one step a week over a month. The progress figure will still be there, still accurate, and still telling you which step is next.

The wizard is also the quickest way to review a running school

Once a school is established, the same six steps make a useful annual health check: open the wizard and read the counts. One academic year when you run three, one staff record where there are twenty, a fee structure with no instalments — each is a gap the dashboard would never have flagged.