Staff management is where the school keeps its employment records. Each row is one employee: their name, how to reach them, the role they hold, their contract, their salary, the date they were hired and the courses they teach. Opening a row gives you the full file — identity, contract details, workload, pay history and the logbook entries behind their wage.

Three people work here. The secretary registers new staff and keeps the contact details current. HR holds the contract, the national identification number, the bank details and the salary. The bursar reads the same rows to build the monthly payroll, and the head of school opens them to see who is teaching what before approving a timetable.

Every employee here also has an account. The two are connected but they answer different questions: Users decides what somebody may open, Staff management records what you owe them. A teacher can be given the right access without a contract, and given a contract without being given access — and only one of those two things makes them payable.

Register a person once

Click New Staff and give the name, the email address, the phone number and a WhatsApp number. The email is the link to their account, so use the address they already use to sign in rather than creating a second identity for them. Add the matricule your school issues if you use them, because that is how you will recognise the row in a list of two hundred.

Give them their roles on the same form

The Roles column is set here as well as in Users, and it is the same field. A teacher who also coordinates a level carries a lecturer role; a secretary who takes fees carries the secretary role, and only that. Get this right at registration and nobody has to chase access rights in week three of term.

Non-teaching staff belong here too

A cleaner, a cook, a driver or a watchman is on this list with a contract and a wage, and has no courses. That is not a lesser record: it is the record the payroll runs from. Their hours go into the execution logbook like anybody else’s — the screen even offers a non-teaching duty course for the purpose, so the date and hours worked can be recorded without inventing a lesson.

One row per person, never two

If somebody teaches in the morning and administers in the afternoon, that is one employee with two roles and two sets of courses — not two staff rows. Two rows would pay the same person twice, count their hours twice, and make a payroll that no longer balances against the bank.

Permanent or part-time

Contract type is Permanent or Part-Time, and it is the first question the payroll asks. A permanent member of staff is paid on their base salary; a part-time member is paid on the hours they actually taught and verified in the execution logbook. Choosing wrongly is not a cosmetic error — it changes the shape of the wage.

Base salary for permanent staff

Base Salary is the monthly amount a permanent employee is paid whatever the logbooks say. A mathematics teacher on a base salary of 150 000 XAF receives 150 000 XAF; their verified hours still matter, but they inform the next salary review rather than the current payment.

Hourly rate for part-time staff

Hourly Rate is what multiplies verified hours. A part-time teacher at 2 500 XAF an hour who logs and gets verified for 96 hours in a month is paid 240 000 XAF for that month — a figure the payroll calculates from the logbook, not from anything typed into the payroll screen.

Bank details complete before the first pay run

Bank and Account Number sit on the same tab, beside the national identification number and the hire date. Fill them before the first wage run rather than after: a payroll line with no account number is a line you have to settle manually, and the month-end then closes late.

Workload is set for a term, not for the year

The Workload Allocation tab opens on an academic term. Choose the term, tick the courses that person teaches in it, and mark one as the primary instructor where a course is shared. Repeat per term — and this matters, because a teacher who covers a subject only in the second term is only paid for the second term.

Allocation drives three things at once

Workload is not paperwork. It decides which courses appear on that person’s My Courses screen, which timetable slots they can be logged against in the execution logbook, and which lessons they can publish. A teacher absent from a course’s workload will not see that course at all, and will find that they have no session to log.

One instructor marked primary, because two would be ambiguous

Where a course is taught by a team, mark one person as the primary instructor. That is the person who owns the course content, the assessments and the final figures; a co-teacher contributes without being able to overturn them.

Change it in the same week as the timetable

When a teacher is reassigned mid-term, update their workload and the timetable together. Updating only one leaves a session in the timetable that nobody can log, and the month’s verified hours will be short by exactly that session.

An empty payroll history is the visible signal

The Financials & Payroll tab says plainly when a staff member has no payroll records yet. That usually means one of two things: their contract fields were never filled in, or their teaching hours have not been logged and verified. Check the contract first, because it is the quicker of the two to fix and it will not fix itself.

An empty logbook is the hidden signal

Scroll further down the profile and the Execution Logbook section lists that person’s entries with their status. Verified entries are what the payroll reads; entries sitting at Submitted or Confirmed are invisible to it. A part-time teacher with a full term of entries and none verified is not a payroll problem — it is a confirmation and HR verification that has not happened yet.

Reconcile the two lists before you generate

Open the payroll screen and cross it against the profiles. Every part-time employee you expect to pay should have verified hours in the month, and every permanent employee should have a contract type and a base salary. Running the payroll with a gap in either list produces a wage that is short for one person and has to be corrected after the fact.

Import the school’s existing staff list once

Download the sample import from this screen and bring in the staff you already employ — names, contacts, contract types and rates — rather than registering fifty people one dialog at a time. Then assign the courses on the workload tab for each of them.