Report cards: designing the page a parent keeps
The screen where your school’s marks, name and colours meet on one piece of paper.
The Slips & Certificates Design screen is where you decide what a term report card looks like. It is not a spreadsheet export: it is a page you lay out yourself, with your school’s name, logo and colours, and then Ekati fills in the real data of each learner when the slips are printed. A school that has branded its receipts but prints a default report card has finished half the job.
Two kinds of document live here. A Slip / Report Card is the term or sequence report: the learner’s name and matricule, a table of subjects with marks, coefficients, average, rank, mention, remarks, a decision, a date and the signature blocks. A Certificate is the completion document for a vocational or graduation course, and a Payment slip is the printable record of a settlement. Each template carries a type, so the right design is used for the right document.
Design it once per school, or once per level if you need a different look for primary and secondary. From then on, printing a term for a class is a single button, and every page comes out identical — which matters, because a stack of slightly different report cards is the first thing a parent notices.
From a blank page to a printed term in five steps
Most schools finish this in one sitting.
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Step 1
Open the designer
Go to Slips & Certificates Design and click the pencil on the template you want to change, or New to start one.
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Step 2
Set the paper
Choose Portrait or Landscape, or type your own width and height, then set the page margins from the padding control.
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Step 3
Add the school block
Drop a text box for the school name, an image for the logo and one for the student, then drag them into position on the page.
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Step 4
Insert the codes
Use the Help / Codes panel to insert [LEARNER_NAME], [CLASS_AVERAGE], [RANK], [PASS_DECISION] and [SUBJECT_TABLE] wherever you need them.
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Step 5
Save, preview, print
Press Preview to see the page with example data, Save Design, then print the whole class from the broadsheet.
Designing a layout with codes instead of typing names
You design one page; the school fills it a thousand times.
Wrap a code in brackets anywhere in a text
Every field on the final page is a code written inside square brackets. Write [LEARNER_NAME] in a text box and it becomes that learner’s name on the printed slip. The panel under Help / Codes lists them all with a plain description of each, and clicking one inserts it where your cursor is. The ones worth knowing first are [SCHOOL_NAME], [SCHOOL_LOGO], [ACADEMIC_YEAR], [TERM], [LEARNER_NAME], [LEARNER_MATRICULE], [LEARNER_PHOTO], [LEARNER_CLASS], [AVERAGE], [RANK], [TOTAL_SCORE], [CLASS_AVERAGE], [PASS_DECISION], [MENTION], [REMARKS], [DATE], [SIGNATURE_PRINCIPAL] and [SIGNATURE_TEACHER].
One code builds the whole marks table
[SUBJECT_TABLE] is the exception to everything else: insert it once and Ekati generates the entire subject table — one row per subject with the mark, the maximum, the coefficient and the mention — sized to whatever space the box occupies. This is why a design that works with five subjects also works with twelve. Nothing about the table is typed or ordered by hand.
Codes also work inside an image and a background
An Image URL field accepts [SCHOOL_LOGO] or [LEARNER_PHOTO], so the logo and the learner’s picture are placed by code rather than by uploading one fixed file. The same applies to a background image section, which is how a school puts its watermark or its letterhead behind the whole page.
Preview before you trust it
Preview renders the design with example data, so a code typed wrongly shows as a literal [SOMETHING] rather than as a blank space on three hundred printed pages. Preview every design once after editing it. It is the difference between a five-minute check and a morning of reprinting.
Printing a term for a whole class
The results have to be published before the slips mean anything.
Publish first, print second
A slip built from marks that have not been published is a private document, not a report. In Assessment > Class Broadsheet, choose the class and the term and press Publish Results. The button is locked until every course has submitted, and the message names the subjects still missing. Publish, then print — in that order, every term.
One click for the whole class
On the same broadsheet, the Report cards (PDF) button produces one file containing the slip of every learner in that class for that term, laid out from the template you designed. Choose the class and the term, press it, and print. There is no need to print learner by learner, which is where most of the time used to go.
One learner at a time
Each row of the broadsheet carries a small PDF link that opens a single learner’s slip — the sensible choice when a parent comes to the office for their child only. The Results list, reachable from the same place, lists every learner in a class and term with their matricule and gives you the same single-slip link per learner, plus a button to print all of them together.
Choosing the template for the print
A school may hold several templates — one per level, one per type of document. Set the one you want as the Default on the list, and mark the others Active or not. Inactive templates stay in your library for next year without being offered to the printing screen, which keeps a cluttered list from turning into a wrong choice at the worst possible moment.
Report card questions
Asked by heads of school before the first end-of-term printing.
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Do I need to design a separate slip for primary and secondary?
You can, and many schools do — but it is not required. One well-made template with the codes in it adapts to every level, because the subject table, the average and the rank are all filled in from the data. Design a second one only when the two levels genuinely need a different look, for example because one has a second page for the general remarks.
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How do I print report cards for a whole class?
Open Assessment > Class Broadsheet, choose the class and the term, make sure the results are published, then press Report cards (PDF). One file comes back with one slip per enrolled learner. For a single learner, use the small PDF link on their row; the Results list gives you the same link for everyone in the class.
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My codes are printing as [LEARNER_NAME] instead of a name. What happened?
The code was typed with the wrong brackets, or with a space inside them, so Ekati did not recognise it and printed it literally. Open the designer, click the text element, and re-insert the code from the Help / Codes panel rather than typing it — the panel always inserts the exact form. Press Preview afterwards: if the code still shows literally there, the element is a background image or a shape rather than a text box.
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Can I put our school logo on every slip automatically?
Yes, by code rather than by uploading. In the designer, set the school logo in the School Block section using the image field and the code [SCHOOL_LOGO]; it is filled from the institution record at print time. The same applies to the learner’s photograph with [LEARNER_PHOTO], so a single design covers a whole class with a different face on every page.