Subscription management: who has paid, until when
The screen that answers “is this school still covered?” before anyone opens a ticket.
Your school runs on Ekati because a subscription is active. This screen is where that fact is checked: which plan or modules a school holds, when the period began, when it ends, what was actually charged, and whether the subscription is currently active, pending, expired or cancelled.
A school administrator and a bursar use this screen for one school — their own — and it answers the question that matters in the last week of every period: how long do we have? A super administrator opens the same screen from the top of the menu and sees every school on the platform, which is what makes it the place to catch an expiry before the school does.
Two lines of reasoning follow from what is on this screen, and it is worth having both. First, the practical one: a school whose subscription has lapsed cannot use the administration portal at all — Ekati sends it straight to the subscribe page until payment is confirmed. Second, the honest one: a record here is evidence. When a school asks what it was charged for a year, this row, with its dates and its price paid, is the answer.
Check a school’s subscription in four steps
Five minutes in the last week of a period, instead of a morning of phone calls.
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Step 1
Open Subscriptions > My Subscriptions
For an institution administrator this shows only your own school. A super administrator sees every school and can filter the list by institution.
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Step 2
Find the row for your school
Read the Institution column, then look at the Module or Package column. A package row means the school is on a bundled plan; a module row means it bought individual modules.
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Step 3
Read the status and the end date
Status tells you whether the portal is open right now. The Period, Start Date and End Date tell you how long it stays that way — check the End Date early, not on the last day.
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Step 4
Check the amount before you renew
Price Paid is what was actually charged, after any discount. Keep the figure with your budget notes so the next renewal is a decision rather than a surprise.
What a subscription row tells you
Four columns, and the two questions each of them answers.
Module or Package
This is what the school bought. A Package row means it is on a bundle — Basic, Standard or Premium — and the modules it can use come from what that package contains. A Module row means it bought particular modules individually, which is what a school wanting three features rather than a whole plan does.
Period
How long the purchase covers: one month, six months or twelve. It is the term that decides whether renewing is a yearly habit or a monthly one, and a school paying monthly has twelve chances a year to notice that the renewal did not go through.
Status
Four words, and only one of them keeps the portal open. Active means the school is covered. Pending means payment was started and not yet confirmed — a normal state for the minutes after someone pays by mobile money. Expired means the period ended. Cancelled means it was stopped deliberately, and it does not come back on its own.
Start date, end date, price paid
The dates are what turn a subscription into a period you can budget for, and the price paid is what you were actually charged. A discount, a promotional rate or a renewal negotiated at a different price all show here as the real figure, which makes this the honest answer to any question about what a school was billed.
When a school’s portal stops loading
The one failure a school notices immediately, and the two ways to prevent it.
Without a valid package, the portal will not load
A school needs a valid package subscription to use the administration portal. When there is none — expired, cancelled, or never activated — the moment any member of staff signs in they are taken straight to the subscribe page instead of their dashboard. There is no reduced mode and no read-only version: the school is simply not in service until the subscription is active again.
Only the subscribe page stays reachable
Signing in, signing out and the purchase pages themselves are deliberately left open, precisely so that a school whose subscription has lapsed can still pay for the renewal. Every other part of the administration portal is behind the check. So if a member of staff reports being “sent back to a subscribe page”, that is not a fault to investigate — read the status on this screen and it will tell you the date.
Renew before the end date, not on it
The last week of a period is when a lapse actually hurts: an enrolment session the morning after a payment was due, a head teacher unable to enter marks. Check the End Date in this screen at the start of each period, and set a reminder for a week before rather than discovering the problem on the morning itself.
Renewing takes one phone
Renewal happens from the subscribe page: choose a package or a module, choose the period, and confirm the payment on your phone with your mobile money number. The status stays Pending for the minutes the operator takes to confirm, then becomes Active and the portal opens for everyone at once — no setting to change, nothing to reinstall.
The rest of the Subscriptions menu
Three screens: what is sold, what is inside it, and who bought it.
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Your plan
My Subscriptions
The same table narrowed to your own school, with the subscribe and renew page one click away.
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What is sold
Packages
The Basic, Standard and Premium bundles, with the modules and quantities each one includes.
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What is inside
Access Modules
The twenty-one individual modules a school can be given on their own, outside any package.
Subscription questions
Asked by the person who renews, in the week before it lapses.
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Our portal stopped loading this morning. What happened?
Almost certainly the subscription lapsed. A school with no valid package subscription is redirected to the subscribe page as soon as anyone signs in, by design, because the alternative is a school working all term without a paid plan. Open your subscription screen, read the End Date and the Status, and renew from the subscribe page — you do not need anyone to change anything for you.
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Do we need a package, or can we just buy the modules we use?
Both are possible, and the module route suits a school that knows exactly what it wants. A package is the better value when you want everything a bundle includes, because its modules are bundled at a lower total than buying them one by one. Whichever you choose, the admin portal needs a valid package subscription to load at all — individual modules extend what a covered school can do.
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When should I renew?
A week before the End Date, and never on it. A renewal started the day a period expires means an enrolment session or a mark-entry afternoon with no access, because confirmation takes the minutes the mobile money operator needs. Put a reminder in your own calendar at the start of each period, using the End Date shown on the subscription row.
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Our renewal is still Pending. Is that a problem?
Not in the first few minutes. Pending means the payment was started and the operator has not confirmed it yet, which is the normal state between confirming on your phone and the confirmation arriving. If it stays Pending for longer than that, the confirmation did not reach the operator — restart it from the subscribe page rather than paying twice.