Set up your academic session and terms
Tell Edunile when your school year starts and ends, and split it into terms. Almost everything else in the system — attendance, fees, report cards — is tied to this, so it's the first thing to set up.
Your academic session is the foundation of everything else in Edunile. Attendance, school fees, exam scores, and report cards all need to know which session and term they belong to. Setting this up correctly at the start saves you a lot of fixing-up later. It only takes about five minutes.
Steps
Open the Academics settings
From your dashboard, go to Settings, then click the Academics tab. You'll see three sections — Classroom Sections, Academic Sessions, and Academic Terms. The session and terms are what you'll set up here. Classroom Sections are for things like A, B, Gold, Silver — you can come back to those later.
Add your academic session
In the Academic Sessions section, click + Add Session. Fill in:
- Name — the way you'd write it on a letter, e.g. 2026/2027 Academic Year.
- Code — a short version for dropdowns, e.g.
2026/27. - Start date — the first day of the new school year (usually the Monday students return).
- End date — the last day of the year, after exams and the long break.
- Session type — leave this as Annual unless you've been told otherwise.
Click Save. The new session will appear in the list marked Planned.
Mark the current session
Find the session you just created and click Activate. This tells Edunile that this is the current school year. From now on, every new student you add, every bill you raise, and every attendance record is automatically linked to this session. Only one session can be active at a time — if you activate a new one later, the previous one moves into your history.
Add your three terms
Scroll down to the Academic Terms section. Click + Add Term and create your terms one by one — First Term, Second Term, Third Term (or your school's names for them).
Terms are how Edunile knows which weeks of the year to count attendance for, which billing cycle a fee belongs to, and which period a report card covers. Without terms, the report card module has nothing to work with.
Check that it worked
Go to Dashboard → Calendar. You should see your session shown at the top of the page, and your terms shown along the calendar. If you also see the session name in the bar at the top of your dashboard, you're good to go — you can start adding classes, students, and fees with confidence.
Common issues
- The 'Activate' button doesn't seem to do anything
Refresh the page first — sometimes the list takes a moment to catch up. If it still doesn't activate, check that your start date is earlier than your end date, and that both are in the current year or later. Sessions with dates in the past can be saved but not activated.
- I see two sessions both marked as the current one
This can happen with older accounts. Open the session you actually want to keep as current and click Activate again — the other one should switch off. If both still show as current, contact support and we'll fix it for you.
- I created a term but it's not showing up
Terms belong to the session that's active at the moment you create them. If you switched sessions before saving, the term went to a different session. Switch back to the right one and you'll see it. Terms can't be moved between sessions — if it's in the wrong place, delete it and create it again.
- I deleted a session by mistake
A session can only be deleted if no students, bills, or attendance records are tied to it yet — so if the delete worked, no real data was lost. Just create it again with the same code and dates and continue. If the delete was blocked, your session is still safe and you can keep using it.