Keeping Your Own Records (and What Happens If You Leave or Come Back)
Your school's records belong to your school. Fees101 keeps them while you use it, but you should always hold your own copy. It takes minutes at the end of each term, and it means you are never dependent on any one system.
Two ways to get your data
- Reports (Money → Reports): tidy files with names and class names, made for people to read. Use these for day-to-day records.
- Full export (Team & Trust → Data & privacy → Export everything): one .zip file with a CSV each for students, parents and guardians, classes, sections, academic sessions, terms, fee items, fee adjustments, invoices, payments, discounts, messages sent, staff accounts, roles and the audit log. It is complete, but some columns hold internal reference codes, so it is harder to read.
Keep both. The reports are what you will actually open, and the full export is your complete backup. Only the account owner can run a full export, because it contains parents' phone numbers and other personal data.
How to store them
01Make one folder for each term.
For example: Fees101 Records, then 2026-2027, then 2nd Term.
02Download your reports into it at the end of each term, and run a full export at the end of each session.
File names already include the date, so keep them as they are.
03Keep two copies in different places.
For example, one on the school's computer and one in a private cloud folder such as Google Drive, in case a computer is lost or damaged.
04Limit who can open them.
Share the folder only with the people who need it, and remove a staff member's access when they leave.
Don't edit your original files. Excel and Google Sheets can change long numbers when they open a CSV, such as phone numbers shown as 2.35E+12. If you want to work on a file, save a copy under a new name and leave the original untouched.
How long to keep them: Fees101 uses six years for financial records, in line with Nigerian tax record-keeping. Ask your accountant if your school needs anything longer.
If you decide to leave
01Settle anything owed to Fees101 first.
A suspended account can't open the app, so you couldn't download anything yourself until it is paid.
02Close your current term if you can, so balances are final.
Then download every report for it.
03Run a full export, open the .zip, and check the files open properly.
Store them as described above.
04Tell parents how to pay from now on.
After you leave, payments are no longer recorded in Fees101 and parents no longer get receipts or reminders from it, so give them your new instructions before you close.
05As the owner, go to Team & Trust → Data & privacy and close the account.
You will confirm that you have exported what you need.
What happens after you close
- For the first 30 days, staff can't sign in but nothing is deleted. The owner can sign back in and cancel the closure, and everything is as you left it.
- After 30 days, personal data such as student and parent details is permanently deleted. Fees101 can't restore it, so your own copy matters.
- Financial records such as invoices and payments are kept for six years with names removed, for tax and audit purposes, then deleted. Because the names are gone, they can't be used to rebuild your school's account.
If you come back
Within the 30 days, sign in as the owner and cancel the closure. After that, you set the school up again, and your saved files make it much faster.
01Set up your school profile, academic structure and fees again.
Your old fee-items and classes files show exactly what you had.
Open your latest Student directory report, and download the Excel template from Students → Import.
03Copy your columns into the template: First name to first_name, Last name to last_name, Admission No to admission_number, Class to class_name, Admission date to admission_date, Parent to parent_name, Phone to parent_phone, Email to parent_email.
Take each student's balance from your latest Debtors report.
04Check the class names match your new classes exactly, and that phone numbers still look right.
Then import the file.