The Institution Admin playbook
As an Institution Admin you have the broadest access on the platform — across every branch, every staff member, every fee transaction, every audit row. With that comes a corresponding rhythm: things to check daily, weekly, monthly, and at term-end.
This article is your routine map. Set calendar reminders for each cadence; once you've got the rhythm, the platform runs itself.
Daily (5 minutes)
Start your day on the main dashboard. Scan for:
- Pending approvals card — leave requests, document approvals, expense approvals routed to you. Knock these out first; nothing is more frustrating to staff than waiting on an admin signature.
- Today's attendance — if it's below 85% institution-wide, drill in to see which sections are dragging. Usually a benign explanation (festival, weather), occasionally a class-teacher absence.
- Alerts strip at the top — subscription renewal, integration failure, scheduled-job errors. Each click takes you to the relevant settings page.
Weekly (20 minutes)
Monday morning is a good slot. Three things:
1. Audit log review
Open the audit log → filter by last 7 days → eyeball the activity. You're looking for outliers:
- Large fee reversals (legitimate? approved by the right people?)
- Sudden bulk-delete actions
- Role-permission changes
- Logins from unexpected locations
2. Defaulters
Open the Defaulters report. Anyone in the 60+ day bucket gets a personal call (or letter) from the front office. Anyone in the 90+ bucket — decide on policy escalation (block transport? block sports?).
3. Pending admissions
Check Students → Admissions → Pending Approval. Approvals stuck more than 5 days are usually a documents issue — chase the parent or chase the front office.
Monthly (45 minutes)
Last working day of the month. Five tasks:
1. Approve payroll
Payroll runs at month-end. As Institution Admin you're typically the approver on the payroll run preview before it generates payslips. See Running payroll.
- Spot-check 2-3 random employees: do their net salaries look right?
- Anomalies grid: anyone on full leave, anyone with zero pay? Verify it's correct.
- Approve. Payslips publish; emails go out.
2. Statutory filings
Open Report: Statutory payroll. Export the PF / ESI / PT challans; hand them to the accountant for filing within the statutory window (usually 15th of the following month).
3. Finance review
Open the Finance dashboard. Review:
- This month's collections vs invoiced. Variance < 10% is healthy.
- Expenses by category vs last month — anything spiking?
- Aged receivables trend — improving or worsening?
4. Performance review (academic months)
During exam months, review:
- Marks distribution for the latest exam.
- Subject performance — any subject below 60% average school-wide?
- Low attendance watchlist — schedule parent meetings for the bottom 5-10%.
5. Backup
Run a data export once a month, even if you've scheduled it. Verify the email arrives + the download link works.
Termly (2 hours)
At each term boundary:
Academic close
- Verify all marks are entered for the term.
- Publish exam results.
- Generate report cards.
- Send announcements to parents about result publication + the next term's schedule.
Fee structure review
- Are this term's fees collected? Outstanding > 5% means there's a system issue, not just a few delinquents.
- Adjust fee structures for the next term if needed (rare mid-year, common at academic-year boundary).
Staff review
- Pending teacher feedback — moderate the backlog.
- Pending leave requests — clear before term-end.
- Any staff separations queued for term-end? Process via the staff detail page.
Annually (half a day)
At the academic-year boundary (typically May-June for Indian schools):
- Promote sections — bulk-promote each section to the next grade. See Programs and class sections.
- Open the new academic year — set it active. See Settings: Academic year.
- Roll over leave balances — handled by the leave policy per the carry-forward rules.
- Copy + adjust fee structures for the new year.
- Refresh the holiday calendar with the new year's holidays.
- Review and renew the Schoolwati plan — see Subscription and billing.
- Annual data export for the archive.
What you delegate, never do yourself
Some things should always be done by another role to keep the four-eyes principle intact:
- Approving your own expense claims — the approval rules routing should send these to another admin.
- Editing your own salary structure — handled by HR, approved by you only when it's someone else's structure.
- Recording your own attendance — admin self-attendance is fine but ideally peer-recorded.
When to escalate to Schoolwati support
- Anything that looks like a platform bug (numbers don't add up, emails don't send, exports time out).
- A user reports they can't do something they should be able to do.
- A workflow you've relied on suddenly behaves differently after an update.
Open a ticket at /helpdesk; we typically respond within a business day on the Standard plan.