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This page is the dependency order an administrator follows on the first sign-in to a brand-new Elimu Bora tenant. Each step is short and links to the module page that owns the detail. The platform does most of the heavy lifting before you sign in: your tenant ships with both Kenyan curricula already in place, the academic calendar seeded with terms for the year, the seventeen pre-seeded roles ready to assign, and a Super Admin account waiting in your welcome email. What is left for you to do is name the school, decide how many class streams to run, bring your people in, and turn on the optional modules your school uses.
This is the school-administrator path. Other people in the school (teachers, bursars, registrars, guardians) reach the panel from their own welcome emails after you add them in step 6.

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Before you start

1

Check your welcome email

Elimu Bora sends a welcome email to the address used to onboard your school. It carries your tenant subdomain (https://<your-school>.elimuboraerp.com) and a Set Your Password link for the Super Admin account. Open it before you start.
2

Have your school basics ready

A high-quality transparent PNG of your school logo, the official school email and phone numbers, and the primary brand colour you want to use across the panel and on report cards.

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Set up the school

1

Sign in as Super Admin

Click Set Your Password in the welcome email, choose a password on the sign-in page on your subdomain, and sign in. You land on the Dashboard. The Super Admin role is locked and holds full access; you will use it for the rest of this setup. Detail: Users & Identity.
2

Set the school identity

Open Settings in the sidebar and fill in the school’s name, logo, contacts, and primary colour. This is the only step that touches branding, and the values appear on every system-generated document (report cards, invoice PDFs, exports). Detail: Settings.
3

Read the current year and term

Go to the Dashboard. The Academic Year widget shows the active year and how much of it has elapsed; the Current Term widget shows the active term and the days remaining. Both update automatically each day. No setup is needed here: your academic years and terms are pre-seeded from the Kenya Ministry of Education calendar. Detail: Academic Years & Terms.
If today is between two terms (a holiday break), the Current Term widget reads No Active Term. That is expected; the next term becomes active automatically on its start date.
4

Open the class streams you will run

Your tenant ships with both curricula, every stage, every grade level, every subject, every senior-school pathway, and every grading scale already in place. The only structural decision left is how many streams to open inside each grade and what to call them (for example, Grade 1 East, Form 4 Red). Go to Settings → Grade Streams and add, rename, or move streams to match the classes your school actually runs. Assign a class teacher to each stream once you have onboarded staff in step 6. Detail: Curriculum.
Curriculum, stages, grade levels, subjects, pathways, and grading scales are pre-seeded and not editable from the panel. Schools do not build the academic structure from scratch; you only adjust the parts that vary school to school (grade streams, class teachers, compulsory-subject flags, custom grading scales).
5

Review the pre-seeded roles

The system ships with seventeen pre-seeded roles (Director, Principal, Bursar, Class Teacher, HOD, HR/Secretary, Librarian, Nurse, and so on). Super Admin and Guardian are locked and cannot be edited or deleted. Open Roles & Permissions in the sidebar and skim what each role grants. If a role’s defaults do not fit your school, you can edit it, or create a custom role, before you start onboarding staff in step 6. Detail: Roles & Permissions.
6

Onboard teachers and non-teaching staff

Go to Teachers and add each teaching staff member (name, email, employee number, the subjects they teach, the roles they hold). Then go to Staff and add each non-teaching staff member (department, position, role). Each save creates the underlying panel account and emails the person a welcome message with a Set Your Password link. For a large intake, use the Import Teachers and Import Staff actions instead. Detail: Users & Identity.
Assign Class Teacher to any teacher who will own a stream, then go back to Settings → Grade Streams and pin them to their streams. The streams now have a named class teacher attached to them.
7

Admit students and link guardians

Go to Students and click New student. The admission wizard captures the student, at least one guardian, the home address, the academic placement (curriculum, stage, grade, stream, and CBC pathway and subjects where they apply), and, if Finance is on, the billing groups that apply. Step 2 of the wizard raises a consolidated Fee Structure invoice for the term. Saving the wizard creates the student’s wallet, creates user accounts for the listed guardians, and emails each guardian their own Set Your Password link. For a large intake, use Import Students and then Import Guardians. Detail: Users & Identity.
Students do not log in to Elimu Bora. Guardians do, under the locked Guardian role, which is read-only and scoped to their own children.
8

Enable the optional modules you use

Optional modules ship turned off so each school decides whether to use them. Go to Settings to enable the ones that apply to your school: Finance, Attendance, Inventory, Events, Timetable, Sports, Clubs, and Activity Log. Detail: Settings.The four foundation modules (Users & Identity, Curriculum, Academic Years & Terms, Assessments & Report Cards) are always on and have no on/off switch.
9

If Finance is on, set up fees and invoices

Open Billables in the sidebar and create the fee items your school charges (tuition, transport, lunch, exam, and so on). Group related billables under a Billable group (for example, “Term 1 fees”) so admission can attach the whole bundle in one step. Once billables exist, raise the term’s invoices, either one student at a time on the Invoices page or in bulk from a billable group. M-Pesa STK push and Paybill come on by configuring the school’s M-Pesa credentials under Settings. Detail: Finance.

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You are ready

At this point staff can sign in from their welcome emails and start working: class teachers mark daily registers (Attendance), subject teachers enter grades when an assessment opens (Assessments & Report Cards), the timetable lays out the school week (Timetable & Lessons), the bursar accepts payments (Finance), and guardians read what concerns their own children (For Guardians). Every change anyone makes is captured in the Activity Log, so you can answer “who changed this and when?” without leaving the panel.