If you're starting the year with a printed class list, a PDF from your old system, or even a handwritten roll, you don't have to type each student in. Take a photo, drop the PDF in, and Edunile reads it for you — names, classes, and parent contact details. You then check each row in a friendly table and click Confirm to save. Most school admins finish a class of 30 in under 5 minutes.

Steps

Step 01

Open the Imports page

From your dashboard menu, click Imports. The page shows a card for Students and a card for Fees, plus your monthly quota at the top and any recent imports below.

Click Students to start a new import.

Imports → Students

Step 02

Upload the photo, PDF, or screenshot

On the Import students page, drag your file into the upload area, or click to pick it from your computer. The supported types are:

Photos (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC) — anything you'd take with a phone.
PDFs — exported lists, scanned documents, or downloads from your old school system.
Screenshots — for example, a grab from a parent-shared WhatsApp image.

The hard limit is 10 MB per file. If your PDF is bigger, split it (e.g. one PDF per class).

Drop your file here, or click to browse

Step 03

Wait while Edunile reads the file

Once uploaded, Edunile sends the file to its AI assistant, which extracts every student, their class, and any parent details it can find. You'll see a progress indicator — for a single class this usually takes 20–60 seconds.

Step 04

Review the rows in the table

When extraction finishes, you'll see a table with every student the AI found. Each row has:

First name and last name — editable if a name was misread.
Class — the AI tries to match the class name on your list (e.g. JSS 1A) to a class in your account. Where the match is confident, the row is set automatically. Where it's unsure, you'll see a dropdown to pick the right class yourself.
Parent name, phone, and email — picked up where they appeared on the source. Optional, but worth filling in if you have them.

Look out for:

Yellow warnings at the top — global issues like "the AI wasn't sure of the school logo on this image".
A small flag on individual rows — usually a low-confidence match or a missing field.

You can fix a row by clicking into any field and typing. You can also delete a row (the trash icon) or add a missing student manually (the Add row button at the bottom).

Review and edit each row — the AI does the heavy lifting, you handle the exceptions

Step 05

Confirm and save

When every row has a first name, last name, and class assigned, the Confirm and import button at the bottom of the page turns on. Click it.

Edunile creates each student record one by one — for 30 students, this takes 5–10 seconds. When it finishes, you'll see a success panel with a link to View students, where you can spot-check the records.

If two students happen to share a parent (siblings on the same row's contact), Edunile automatically links both to one parent account — no extra step needed.

Common issues

The page says 'AI assist is offline'

This appears when your school's AI assistant is paused. Most schools never see this — it usually means we're doing scheduled maintenance. Try again in a few minutes, or add students manually from the Students page in the meantime.

The AI got several names wrong

Handwriting and photo quality are the usual culprits. You can fix names directly in the review table without re-uploading. For the future, photos work best when:

The list is printed or typed (not handwritten).
The phone was held flat over the page, not at an angle.
There's no glare from a window or overhead light.

A student's class is dropped down to 'Pick a class'

The AI wasn't confident enough to match the class name on your list to a class in your account. Just pick the right class from the dropdown and move on. If you do this for many rows, double-check the class names on your Classes page match how they appear on your source list (e.g. JSS 1 A vs JSS1A).

The page says my import quota is used up

Each school can run up to 20 file imports per month — about 600–1,000 students for most schools. If you've already used yours and need more, contact support and we'll extend it for you.

Cancelled imports still count against the quota. If you uploaded the wrong file by accident, finish the review with at least one valid row to make the upload count for something, rather than cancelling.

My PDF is bigger than 10 MB

Split it into smaller PDFs (most PDF readers have an "Extract pages" or "Split" option) and import each one separately. Each file counts as one import against your monthly quota, so try to fit a whole class into one file when you can.

I'd rather upload from a spreadsheet — can I still do that?

Yes. The older spreadsheet-based upload is still available under Batch Upload → Students & Parents. Use it if you already have a clean Excel or CSV file with one student per row. For everything else, the photo/PDF route is faster.