Adding a Student
Adding a student creates their record, links them to a parent/family, and (if a payment provider is connected) auto-provisions a dedicated virtual account for them in the background.
Steps
Go to Students, then Add student.
Fill in the student's first name and last name.
Select the student's class — this sets which fees apply to them.
04Enter the admission number.
It must be unique at your school.
Enter the primary parent's name and phone — phone is required, it's where reminders go and no SMS can send without it.
06Optionally add the primary parent's email.
It's not required, but without it the invoice can only go out as an SMS, not a PDF.
Check the admission date — it defaults to today, but you can set it to the student's actual start date if different.
Optionally click "Add a secondary parent" and fill in their name, phone, and email the same way.
Save.
What happens automatically
- The student is attached to the school's first section row — you don't choose a section here. This is a legacy quirk from when sections were mandatory; sections are optional now, so most schools never notice it.
- If a payment provider (Paystack or Monnify) is connected, a dedicated virtual account is created for the student in the background. This is best-effort — if it fails, it doesn't block adding the student, and you can retry it later from the Payment Accounts page.
Gotchas
You can't add a student at all if platform billing isn't active on your school's account — adding is blocked entirely, not just unbilled.
Admission numbers must be unique per school. If you enter one that's already in use, Fees101 shows you a link to the existing student instead of letting you create a duplicate.
Parent phone numbers are normalized before matching, so 0803…, +234803…, and 234803… are all treated as the same number. If the phone you enter already belongs to a different family on file and the parent name doesn't match, you'll be asked to explicitly confirm the link before the student is added. This exists specifically to stop a mistyped or reused phone number from quietly linking two unrelated families — which would otherwise let one of them claim a sibling discount they don't qualify for.