Ekati has three separate front doors and nine kinds of person who walk through them. Six work inside a school: the super administrator who runs the platform, the institution administrator who runs the school, the secretary, the bursar, the lecturer and the teacher. Three sit outside it: the student, the pupil and the parent. A tenth kind of person — the one who buys the school’s subscription — has no role at all, and buys from the public website.

This page says which door each person uses, what each one finds once inside, and the four steps to give somebody access or take it away. If the word role is unfamiliar, read it as a job rather than a rank: a role decides which entries appear in somebody’s sidebar, and therefore which screens they can open. A bursar is not junior to a secretary. A bursar simply has a different set of doors.

One person may hold more than one role, and several families do exactly that. A school of thirty commonly has one person who is both secretary and bursar, and a parent who is also a teacher keeps both a staff login and a family login at the same time. Neither arrangement is a workaround; both are the ordinary shape of a small school.

Super administrator

The person who runs Ekati itself, not any one school. They see the list of institutions on the platform, the queue of schools waiting to be approved, every school’s subscription, the roles and permissions themselves, and the platform dashboard. This is the only role that reaches across school boundaries, and no school can give it to itself.

Institution administrator

The person who runs one school end to end, and the role most owners or head teachers actually hold. Staff, users, classes, courses, the academic year, admissions, messaging, finance, assessment, scheduling, the school’s website, its settings and its own subscription — all of it, and all of it limited to their own school. What this role cannot reach is the platform: no list of other schools, no approval queue, no role editing.

Secretary

The front office. Admission forms, applications and enrolments; the academic structure — years, classes, courses, booklists, library; messaging; assessment templates, grading scales and class broadsheets; timetables; staff records; and the report slip designer. This is the role that takes a registration at the counter and hands over a receipt, which is why it does not carry the Finance menu: the figures themselves belong to the bursar.

Bursar

The money, and the people who cost money. Fee structures, payments, reconciliation, payouts, payroll, expenditures and orders; enrolments, because a bursar is the person who reads a fee clearance; staff records and the payroll detail on them; configurations, for the payout numbers; and verification of logbook entries. A bursar does not normally open the academic menus at all.

Lecturer

Teaching in a university or a vocational school. The courses allocated to them, the modules and lessons inside them, grade entry, the assignments they set and the submissions they correct, their own timetable, and their own execution logbook. The role is used for higher education and professional teaching, which keeps lecturers distinguishable from classroom teachers in a school that runs both.

Teacher

The same teaching screens as the lecturer, used for basic and secondary teaching: their own courses, their classes, grade entry, submissions, their timetable, their execution logbook, and the report slips their learners receive. Neither teaching role sees fees, staff contracts, enrolments or broadcast messaging — which is how a school can employ a part-time teacher without that teacher ever meeting the payroll.

Student and pupil

Student is the university role and pupil the one for a basic or secondary school — the same experience under the word your school uses. Both live in the learner portal, on a phone: courses, lessons, quizzes, assignments, results, timetable, certificates, booklist and library. A learner sees only the courses they are genuinely attached to, and the answer key of a quiz is never sent to their browser even if they ask for it.

Parent

A deliberately limited role in the same learner portal. A parent sees their children’s fees, results, timetables, lessons and progress, and nothing that belongs to another family. One parent account covers every child linked to it, so a family with four children signs in once. Parents hold no academic permissions and no AI credits, which is why a parent can follow a child’s marks without being able to change them.

The person who buys the subscription

Usually the proprietor, and deliberately not a role. That person uses the public website to pick a plan, pays by mobile money, and is unblocked as soon as the payment is confirmed. There is no staff login involved: buying a subscription does not make you anybody inside the administration portal, and the account that does that is your institution administrator’s.

Create the account before the access

Open Users and add the person: a name, an email address that is really theirs, and a matricule if your school issues one. Leave the password field empty and the account is created without one, ready for them to set on first sign-in — which is the habit worth keeping, because the school then never knows a staff password.

Attach the role

The Roles column on the same row is the whole access decision. Give the narrowest set of roles that lets the person do their job: a secretary, a bursar, a teacher. A school administrator creates every account inside their own school, and the field that would move a user between schools is not even offered to them, so nobody can accidentally create an account belonging to somebody else.

One person may hold two roles

Nothing stops you adding a second role to the same row, and in a small school this is normal rather than exceptional. One person who is both secretary and bursar simply sees both menus, with nothing duplicated. Give the roles in the order the person will need them, so the narrower one is not hiding behind a broader one.

Removing a role takes effect at once

Take the role off and the next page that person opens reflects it. Their already-open screen may need reloading before the menus change, but there is no cached state to clear and no session to end — so revoking the bursar role on a leaver’s last day is a complete answer. Remove the account from the list in the same sitting: that closes the door without touching the enrolment, the payments or the report slips printed for their years of teaching.