Onboarding
Live in a day. Fully onboarded in 7–10 working days.
You may have bought school software before and gone back to the register. That usually happens because nobody moved the data and nobody trained the staff. Both are our job, on a stated timetable.1
- Live in A day
- Fully onboarded 7–10 working days
- Training Office and teachers
- Branded apps 25–30 working days
Why the last one failed
Software rarely fails. The rollout does.
Three things end a school rollout. None of them is a missing feature, and all three happen in the first fortnight.
Day one
What exists by the end of the first day.
We create your school on Skooly, set your session year, and hand the owner login to you. That takes an afternoon, and it does not wait on your data.
- Your school, named and configured, with the owner login in your hands.
- The current session year set, so every record that follows is filed under it.
- Your school website live on yourschool.skooly.pk, with your name on it.
- Admissions open — the office can enrol a walk-in that same afternoon.
- A WhatsApp group with the people who will actually do your onboarding.
From that point your school is a real place in the system. Everything in the next week fills it in.
The 7–10 working days
Seven steps, and you only own two of them.
We do the setup, the import and the training. You send one spreadsheet and put two hours aside for your staff.
Your school goes live
We create the school, set the session year, publish your school website and give you the owner login. Your office can admit a student that afternoon.
The shape of your school
Classes, sections, mediums, shifts and streams, named the way your school names them. Class 6-B, morning shift, English medium is one record everything else hangs off.
Students and staff imported
One sheet per class-section, uploaded against the class it belongs to. Guardians are created from the same rows, so a family with three children ends up with one parent login.
Photographs, roll numbers, ID cards
Photographs go up a class at a time on one screen, student and guardian together. Roll numbers are assigned per section. ID cards print from the same records.
Your fee structure
Fee types defined once — tuition, admission, transport, exam — and assigned to the classes that pay them. Instalment dates and late charges go in here.
Staff accounts and who sees what
Roles are per school and permissions are per module. Your fee clerk gets fees. A class teacher gets her own sections. Nobody gets a screen they should not see.
Training, then one real cycle
Two training sessions, then we stay with you through the first attendance morning and the first fee cycle. That cycle is what tells us you are actually onboarded.
What we need from you
One spreadsheet per class. These columns.
This is the whole list. We send you the template, you fill it in or send us what you already have, and we do the import.
| Column | What goes in it | Required |
|---|---|---|
| first_name, last_name | The child’s name as it should print on a result card. | Yes |
| gender | Male or female. Anything else and the whole file is rejected — nothing is imported until every row is valid. | Yes |
| dob | Date of birth, as DD-MM-YYYY. Used on the result card and the ID card. | Yes |
| admission_date | The date the child joined your school, not today’s date. | Yes |
| mobile | The student’s own number, for older classes. Leave it blank otherwise. | No |
| current_address, permanent_address | Both columns. They can carry the same line if there is only one address. | Yes |
| guardian_first_name, guardian_last_name | The parent or guardian who will hold the login and get the alerts. | Yes |
| guardian_gender | Male or female, for the parent or guardian. Same two values as the student column. | Yes |
| guardian_mobile | The number your office actually calls when the child is absent. | Yes |
| guardian_email | One per family. This is what joins brothers and sisters to a single parent login. | Yes |
Skooly matches guardians on the email address. Two children carrying the same guardian email become one parent account with two children in it. Two children carrying different emails become two separate parents, and the family gets two logins and two sets of alerts.
Most schools in Pakistan do not hold an email for every parent. Tell us that before you fill the sheet in. We work through the blanks with your office first, rather than unpicking duplicate accounts afterwards.
Training
Two sessions, both recorded.
One person learning the software is how a rollout dies in March. So we train two groups separately, and we record both.
The first two weeks after training
We do not hand over and disappear. The two weeks after training are where a school either adopts the system or quietly stops opening it.
- Week one. Attendance every morning, in every section. This is the habit that carries everything else, and it is the one we chase. If a section has not marked by mid-morning, we tell you which section.
- Week two. Your first fee cycle in Skooly — fees assigned with due dates, payments recorded at the window, the defaulters list read once. We are on WhatsApp while it happens, not afterwards.
Getting parents onto the app belongs in these two weeks as well. Alerts reach parents through the app, so a family with nothing installed sees nothing. Ask us to help you push installations at the first parent-teacher meeting.
Honestly
What pushes a school past ten days.
Two things, and neither is the software. Both are easier to fix before you start than halfway through.
This is the single biggest cause of delay, and it is not close. If your roll exists only in a hard register, somebody has to type it before anything can be imported. That somebody works in your office.
A school in this position should plan on longer than 7–10 working days. The way through it is one class at a time. Your office types the current session’s roll class by class, and we import each sheet as it lands. Start with the classes that pay the most fees.
Starting at a term boundary is materially easier. Mid-term you inherit a half-collected fee cycle and a half-marked attendance register. Until you decide what to do with both, your office keeps two records.
It is still worth doing — waiting four months is worse. So we settle two questions up front. Which date does attendance start in Skooly? And are fees already taken this term entered as recorded payments, or left on paper until the next cycle? Pick an answer to each and hold it.
What it costs
Onboarding is free on Premium. PKR 15,000 once on Free.
Setup, data import and both training sessions are the same work on every plan. The only difference is whether it appears on an invoice. Branded apps run on their own track and do not hold up your go-live.2
- Working days means Monday to Saturday, minus public holidays. Where you land in the 7–10 working days depends mostly on how fast your answers come back, not on how large your school is.
- Branded apps are a separate 25–30 working days track on Premium Plus and they do not hold up your go-live. Your staff and parents use the Skooly-branded apps from day one, then move to yours when they are published.
Related
Questions
Common questions
We bought school software before and stopped using it. Why would this go differently?
Because the two things that killed it last time are our work, not yours. We import your students and staff ourselves rather than handing you a blank screen. We train two groups separately and record both sessions, so the knowledge does not leave with one person.
Then we stay through your first attendance morning and your first fee cycle. If a section has not marked the register by mid-morning in week one, we tell you which section.
What does “live in a day” actually mean?
By the end of the first day your school exists on Skooly, your session year is set and your school website is published. Your office holds the owner login and can enrol a walk-in that afternoon. That is real, and it is deliberately not a claim to be finished.
The full roll imported, photographs uploaded, fee structure built and staff trained is the 7–10 working days. We quote both halves together for exactly this reason.
Our records are in registers, not a spreadsheet. Can you still do it?
Yes, but be realistic with yourself: this is the single biggest cause of delay and you should plan on longer than 7–10 working days. Somebody in your office has to type the current roll before it can be imported.
Do it one class at a time and send each sheet as it is finished. We import them as they arrive rather than waiting for the whole school, so classes go live in order.
Can we start in the middle of a term?
Yes. Most schools do not get to pick their timing. It is harder than starting at a term boundary, so we settle two questions first. Which date does attendance begin in Skooly? And are fees already collected this term entered as recorded payments, or left on paper until the next cycle?
Decide both before the import, not during it. The cost of not deciding is that your office runs two records for the rest of the term.
What exactly do we have to send you?
One spreadsheet per class-section with student name, gender, date of birth, admission date, address, and the guardian’s name, mobile and email. We send the template. Class, section and roll number are not columns — class-section is chosen at upload and roll numbers are assigned afterwards.
Staff are a second, shorter sheet: name, mobile, email, date of birth, salary and joining date.
Every parent needs an email address? Most of ours do not have one.
Skooly matches guardians on the email address. It is a required column, and siblings must share one to land in a single parent account. Tell us before you fill the sheet in. We work through the blanks with your office, family by family, so no parent ends up with two logins.
How much of our staff’s time does this take?
Two hours of training, split into an office session and a teacher session. Beyond that, somebody answers our questions about how your school names its classes and charges its fees. The setup, the import and the photograph upload are ours.
The one job we cannot take off you is getting your data into a spreadsheet if it is not already there.
Do you charge for onboarding?
It is PKR 15,000 one-time on the Free plan, and included at no charge on Premium and Premium Plus. The work is identical on all three — same setup, same import, same two training sessions.
Send us one class’s list and start the clock.
We will import it, set that class up properly, and show you your own students in Skooly before you commit to anything.
Cancel any time · Your data stays yours