Schools & Training Centres

Two businesses, one set of screens

A school needs to know who its students are, which stage each belongs to, who the guardian is and how to reach them, who was present today, what marks were achieved this term, which bus a child rides and what was served for lunch. Most of that is record-keeping. It has to be accurate, it has to be searchable years later, and it does not move a single riyal.

A training centre sells courses. It publishes a catalogue, opens an intake with a lecturer and a price, signs students up, and then does what every business does — bills the fee, agrees a payment plan and chases the instalments.

Nama serves both from the same module, because underneath they are the same two halves in different proportions.

The academic structure, built top down

A school describes itself once, in four master files that nest. Stage types group the stages; educational stages are Primary, Preparatory and Secondary — or Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced in a training centre — and they can sit under one another, so a large school models Primary → Lower and Upper Primary rather than flattening everything into one list. A class room is one division of a stage, and a rank is the smallest named grouping inside it, section 4/A and 4/B.

The educational stage is the record everything else leans on. It appears on students, class rooms, ranks, courses, attendance sheets, monitoring, mark sheets and the fee list. Agree that list with the school before entering anything else, because every screen downstream inherits a mistake made there.

Students and guardians are both full accounting parties, which is what later lets a fee sit on whichever of them actually owes it. A lecturer is an employee; a contractor is the agency or sponsor an enrolment came through.

The register half

Attendance is one document per stage per day — the register question a school asks once each morning, not a per-lesson record. The header carries the stage and the day; a single grid carries one line per pupil, a tick for present, and free text for the child who arrived at 8:40 or left with her mother before assembly. A school with three stages produces three of these every morning, and a term’s attendance is the pile of them.

Alongside it sit daily monitoring — the behaviour and follow-up diary — and leave permissions for early departures, against a reason list you define.

Marks are recorded per student, per course, per semester, with the subjects and their maximum and pass marks carried across from the course rather than retyped.

Around the school, buses carry their own register and incident log, meals have a catalogue and a delivery record, and school trips get a file of their own.

The half that carries the money

A course definition is the catalogue card — what the course is, which level it sits at, how it is taught, how many hours it runs. A course is the intake that actually runs: its lecturer, its semester, its planned dates, its cost, and its sales price.

That sales price is the single bridge between the two halves. A course contract enrols students — one line each, and a company sending five staff on one course is one contract with five lines, not five contracts — and picking the course copies its price onto every line. Twelve students at 1,800 is 21,600, and a scholarship or a negotiated corporate rate is an edited line rather than a different process.

The contract’s term decides which accounts it debits and credits, and its value date is the base the instalment plan counts forward from. Get those two right and the rest follows: the schedule is built by hand, from a payment template, or by a generate button, and the down payment is recorded on the contract’s own payment lines.

Saving the contract writes its ledger entries in the background — the fee owed on one side, the training revenue on the other. There is no separate posting step anywhere in Nama.

When a student withdraws in week three, a cancellation copies the contract down, you keep only that student’s line, and processing it books the mirror entry and settles the instalments that no longer apply.

What it does not pretend to be

There is no timetable, no enrolment transaction and no attendance figure that feeds a fee. Nothing in the register half touches the money half except that one price. For a school, that is usually the right trade — the fee is agreed at enrolment and does not vary with attendance — but it is worth knowing before anyone assumes a per-session billing model exists.

The master files, the contract and its cancellation, the register and the marks sheet are documented screen by screen in the Education guide.