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No jargon and no fluff — what each part of Palmgrade does, what you can configure, and where we do it better. Built for primary and secondary schools across Africa.
Click through the story, or use the fullscreen button to present it.
The problem
A module is an area your school works in — its own screens, its own records, its own permissions. Here is every one of them, in plain language.
The foundation
One place for every student — replacing the folder cabinet, the class register and the three spreadsheets that disagree with each other.
Full profiles — Photo, admission details, class, contact information and status — searchable and filterable.
Guardians — Primary and secondary guardians per student, with the phone numbers pickup alerts and result links use.
Documents — Birth certificates, transfer letters and reports attached to the student, compressed automatically on upload.
Your academic structure — Classes, subjects, sessions and terms defined the way your school actually runs.
End-of-session promotion — Move a whole class up a level in one step, and graduate your final-year students — no re-typing.
Bulk import — Bring an existing roster in from Excel, photos included, instead of entering hundreds of students by hand.
Leavers keep a status — graduated, transferred, archived — instead of being deleted. Your plan only counts ACTIVE students, so keeping your history costs you nothing.
Every day
Know who is in the building, who left, and who they left with — without a paper register that can go missing.
Daily register — Mark present, absent or late per class, with the day's totals visible at a glance.
Gate check-in and check-out — A log of who arrived, who left, at what time — and which guardian dropped off or collected each child.
Private pickup alerts — When a guardian arrives, one tap notifies that child's teacher directly.
It replaces the PA announcement. Nobody broadcasts a child's name across the school to say their driver is waiting — the right teacher simply gets a notification.
Light LMS
Set homework, get it to parents on the channel they already use, and keep a record of who has turned theirs in.
Assign by class and subject — Set the work and a due date; it appears for the right class immediately.
Textbook library — Keep the textbooks your school uses on file, with covers, and reference them from any assignment.
Private share links — Generate a secure link and send it to parents over a WhatsApp broadcast — nothing to install on their side. The link is read-only: parents see the work, they do not submit through it.
Submission tracking — Work is still handed in on paper. The teacher ticks off each student who has turned theirs in, so the outstanding list is on record instead of in a notebook.
Homework reaches parents the same way results do — a private link, no account. Most platforms need every parent to download an app first, which is where the process usually dies.
Assessment
Set an exam once, and let the software run it, invigilate it and mark it — whether or not the network holds.
Runs offline — Answers are held on the student's device and sync when the connection returns — a dropped network does not end the exam.
Anti-cheat built in — Shuffle questions and options per student, cap tab-switches with auto-submit, enforce fullscreen, and optionally capture webcam photos.
Live monitoring — Watch who is taking what and how far along they are — then pause, extend, stop or force-submit an exam while it runs.
Question bank — Save questions once and reuse them across exams, terms and sessions.
Preview before you publish — Dry-run any exam exactly as a student would see it — no password, and nothing saved or submitted.
Real exam settings — Images in questions, question groups, per-exam instructions, an on-screen calculator, timing and scheduling.
Results at a glance — Participation, average score and pass rate for every exam, exportable to CSV, JSON or Excel.
Students sit an exam with a password — no account to create, nothing to install. Platforms that require every student to be provisioned a login turn exam day into an IT project.
Results
Enter each score once. Averages, letter grades and everything downstream compute themselves.
Score entry by roster — Pick a term, class and subject and work straight down the list — built for entering many scores quickly.
Automatic grading — Letter grades and term averages are computed as you type, using your school's grading scheme.
Feeds report cards and the parent portal — The same scores become a report card, and the card you publish is what a parent sees on their private link — no second export step.
Records and export — Browse a term's records and export to CSV, JSON or Excel — with one sheet per class when you export them all.
Marking, computing and publishing are one action, not three — and report cards build on exactly this data, with nothing to re-enter.
End of term
The term's scores become a finished, school-branded report card — for a whole class at once, not one child at a time.
Generated, not typed — Scores, grades, class averages, attendance and positions are pulled from what the school already recorded. Teachers write the remarks; the software does the arithmetic.
Termly and cumulative — A second- or third-term card carries the year so far — each term's score beside the running average — so a parent can see whether a child climbed or slid.
Verifiable — Every card carries a QR code. Anyone holding the paper can scan it and be told whether that exact card is genuine, has been replaced, or was withdrawn.
Published cards do not change — A card is frozen when you issue it, grading scale included. Correcting one creates a new version with a stated reason — the old one is never quietly rewritten.
Print a class at a time — Select the cards you want and print them as one stack, one card per sheet, ready for A4.
Reaches parents on the same link — A published card appears on the private link a parent already has — nothing to send, and no second portal to explain.
Forged report cards are a real problem here, and no competitor addresses them. Ours can be checked in seconds by scanning the paper itself — and the school decides what a card says, down to which columns print.
Finance
Bill the term once, then know at any moment who has paid, who is part-paid and who owes — without a ledger book or a spreadsheet per class.
Fee structures per class and term — Define what each class owes, with optional items like bus or lunch added only for the students who take them.
Issue a whole class of invoices at once — Every student gets an itemised bill with its own number, and an invoice keeps the amounts it was issued with even if you change the structure afterwards.
Record cash and transfers — Log a payment against the right student in seconds, part-payments included, and print or send the receipt.
Or let parents pay online — Parents open a private link and pay by card or transfer; the money settles to your school's own bank account and the invoice updates itself.
Reconciled records, exportable — Payments, balances and outstanding lists browse and export to CSV or JSON — a bursar's record, not a bank statement to decode.
Every payment is matched back to a student automatically. Schools collecting into a plain bank account spend the first week of every term decoding a statement to work out whose fees those were.
Parents
Parents check their child's results themselves, so your office stops fielding the same phone call every term.
A private, tokenised link — Each link opens exactly one child's results and nothing else, and can be revoked.
No account, no app — No password for a parent to forget and no download to talk them through — the link simply opens.
Printable — School-branded and ready to print if a parent wants a hard copy.
Re-opens offline — Once a parent has opened the link, it still works on a bad connection.
The reason most parent portals fail is that parents never sign up. This one has nothing to sign up for.
These are not modules you visit — they run underneath all of them, and none of them costs extra.
Up to five staff stay signed in on one computer — or one installed app — and switch between accounts instantly, without retyping a password. Each account locks behind its own PIN, so a colleague stepping away never locks anyone else out.
Owner, Admin and Teacher, plus custom roles like Bursar or Exams Officer — each with per-permission control over exactly what they can see and do.
Install Palmgrade like an app. Core screens and the exam engine keep working on a bad connection, then sync when it returns.
Step away from a shared office computer and lock Palmgrade behind a PIN — without signing out or losing what is on screen.
A notification feed for every staff member, so what matters is on the record instead of in someone's head.
Press Ctrl+K and jump straight to any student, exam or page — from anywhere in the app.
Simplify administration and spend more time on teaching. Palmgrade is built for schools across Africa.
Start with a 14-day free trial. No debit card required.
