Academic calendar¶

Who does this: Academic Administrator Where: School → Academic Calendar How often: Once a year, before anything else

The academic year is the frame every other record hangs in. A register, a fee account, a class list and a bus seat all belong to a year, so the year has to exist and be correct before any of them can.

What the year holds¶


Name and dates	What the school calls the year, and the day it starts and ends
School Week	Which weekdays the school opens
Terms	As many as the school runs, each with the weight it carries towards the year's result
Holidays	Dated closures, single days or ranges

Two rules the system enforces without being asked:

Exactly one year is Active per school at a time.
Years may not overlap. If 2026–27 ends in June, 2027–28 cannot start in May.

Process — opening a new year¶

School → Academic Calendar → Academic Years → New.
Enter the name and the start and end dates.
Open the School Week tab and tick the days the school opens.
Open the Terms tab and add each term with its dates and weight.
Open the Holidays tab and add the closures already known. More can be added at any time while the year runs.
Press Activate.

The year is now the school's running year: new enrollments, registers, fee accounts and allocations default to it.

Prepare next year while this year runs

A year in Draft is a plan. You can build next year's terms, holidays and fee structures months ahead. Only Activate is exclusive, so the planning never disturbs the year in progress.

Why the school week matters more than it looks¶

The school week is the answer to one question the system asks constantly: was the school open on this date?

It decides:

which dates the register will accept at all;
which days a parent's approved leave actually marks as absent — an eleven-day leave over two weekends marks the teaching days only;
which days count in an attendance percentage.

If the school week is left empty, the system accepts any date inside the year rather than refusing everything. An empty table means nobody has said what the school's week is, not that the school never opens — and the first morning is the one morning the register has to work. Fill it in before that morning.

Process — closing a year¶

Closing is not a flag. It settles everything the year still holds, in one action:

Open the year and press Close Year.
Every enrollment still Active in that year becomes Completed. Withdrawn and transferred-out enrollments are left exactly as they are: the distinction between a child who finished the year and one who left in November is what that year's fee and attendance reports are built on.
Every leave request still waiting for a decision is Cancelled, with a note saying the year closed before it was decided. Requests already approved or rejected are untouched — they are the record of what was decided.
The year's register becomes undeletable, by anyone.

What closing does not do¶

It does not close the money. A family that still owes for 2026–27 is chased in 2027–28, and closing the year is not the school forgiving the debt. Fee accounts outlive their year on purpose.

Reopening a year¶

Reset to Draft exists, and the system will refuse it in two cases:

Another year is running. Close the current one first. Two years offering themselves for enrolment at once is how a child gets registered into the wrong one.
Invoices have been posted into the year. Reopening would put the school's books back into a period it has already reported on. The message says how many invoices there are.

Periods¶

School → Academic Calendar → Periods.

Periods are only needed if any part of the school marks attendance period by period, or once the timetable arrives. Each period has a start and end time and can be marked as a break. Overlapping periods are refused.

Status summary¶

Status	Meaning
Draft	Being prepared. Not the school's running year.
Active	The running year. One per school.
Closed	Finished and settled. Its records are read-only history.