A subscription is the arrangement between Ekati and your school: a plan, a price, a period and an end date. What it buys is not “the internet” but a set of named modules — admissions, messaging, the store, the report card designer, the AI features — and your school can only use what its current plan includes. This is the one place where what you paid for and what you can click are the same thing, which is why it deserves to be checked rather than assumed.

Three screens. My Subscriptions lists what your school actually holds: the plan, the period, the start and end dates, the price paid and the status — active, pending, cancelled or expired. Access Modules is the catalogue of what can be bought: each module with its code, its label, its description and its price, flat or not. Packages is the catalogue of the bundles, each one a group of modules sold at a single price.

Only a super administrator opens Access Modules and Packages, because those are the prices and the definitions for the whole platform. An institution admin and a bursar open My Subscriptions, which is their own school’s record: what it is on, when it expires, and the button to renew. That separation is the point — the school pays for a plan, and it is the platform that decides what that plan contains.

Package, Module, Period, Starts, Ends, Price paid

Package is the bundle you bought; Module / Forfait is the individual access module, which matters when a school holds a module on its own rather than inside a bundle. Period is the length you paid for — a month, six months or twelve. Starts at and Ends at are the two dates that decide whether your school can use anything at all. Price paid is what you actually handed over, in XAF, and it stays on the record after the subscription has ended.

The end date is the one to watch

A subscription runs until its end date and no further, unless somebody renews it. Renewal adds the new period to what is left rather than resetting the clock, so renewing early does not lose days. The moment the end date passes, the status changes to expired and the modules your plan included stop being available to your school. Nobody is locked out silently in the middle of a term: the end date is a date you can see coming.

Buy more time before you need it

From My Subscriptions, Renew opens the checkout for the current plan. Choose the period, choose MTN Mobile Money or Orange Money, type the number that will pay, and confirm on your phone as you would for anything else. When the operator confirms, the new end date appears on the record and the success message tells you the subscription is active again. If the confirmation does not arrive in time, the screen says so and lets you try again rather than leaving you unsure whether the money was taken.

Who sees which screen

An institution admin and a bursar see their own school’s subscription and nothing else. A super administrator sees every school on the platform and can filter the list by institution, module, package and status, which is the view to use when someone calls to say their school has lost access.

Renew a month early, not on the day

The single most common cause of a school losing access is not a technical fault: it is that the end date arrived while somebody was on holiday. Renew from My Subscriptions at least a month before Ends at, and read the new end date back to yourself once it is confirmed. Five minutes in August is cheaper than an interrupted term in November.

What a lapsed subscription affects

Your school’s access to the modules its plan included — and therefore the screens behind them. Data is not at risk: the learner records, the marks, the payments and the report card designs stay exactly where they are, and they reappear as soon as an active subscription is in place. What stops is the day-to-day work, which is why the date belongs in the bursar’s calendar rather than in someone’s memory.

Keep the plan that matches the school you are

A one-room primary school and a large secondary college do not need the same plan, and neither of them needs the largest one. Read what each package includes before renewing: the point of the package list is that you can see which modules you would give up by stepping down, or gain by stepping up. A super administrator can add an individual module to a school that needs one feature the bundle does not carry.

A note for the person who answers the phone

If a teacher says they cannot open a screen, check the subscription before checking the role. The two produce the same symptom — a menu that will not open — and only one of them is fixed by the renewal date.