Student records, fees and messages in one office

A typical school office morning: the roll is in a spreadsheet, the fees are in a different system, the message goes out from an email account that has no idea who has paid and who has not, and somewhere in the chain the same student's name was spelled two different ways. None of this is unusual. It is just what happens when the tools do not share any information with each other.

Daviah does not claim to replace every piece of software a school uses, and it does not promise that data entered once will flow everywhere without any re-entry — that would overstate what it actually does. What it does do is keep student records, fee tracking and outgoing messages inside the same office, so the people who need those three things together do not have to go looking in three separate places.

The ordinary task that takes far too long

Think about something straightforward: you need to send a message to every student whose fees are outstanding. In a patchwork setup, that means opening the fees system, noting who has not paid, opening the roll to find contact details, copying those across, and composing the message in yet another tool. Every step is an opportunity for something to be out of date or out of step with the step before it.

The problem is not any one tool. It is that none of them know what the others know, so the Bursar or Secretary has to be the bridge between them — manually, every time.

When records, fees and messages live in the same office, you stop retyping the same names just to do ordinary work.

One record for each student, kept in the office

Daviah keeps a record for every student, with a dated history of every change made to that record. When a detail changes, it changes in one place, and that is the record the rest of the office draws from when you are raising fees or writing a message.

Students can be organised into Departments, so if you need to write to a particular year group or subject area, the list is already there — you do not need to build it from a spreadsheet each time.

Each student has a single record with a dated history of changes.
Departments group students so you can act on a specific set without rebuilding the list.
Seven roles — including Secretary, Treasurer and Staff Lead — mean the right people have access to what their role requires.

Fees raised for everyone in one step

At the start of the year, the Bursar raises the fee for every student at once — one action, not one row per student in a spreadsheet. Every student's record then shows what they owe. Students can log in to the school's own portal to see their balance and pay by card when Stripe is connected; cash and cheque payments can be recorded by hand, each with a receipt number that runs in sequence per year.

Any waiver or correction is the Treasurer's decision and is written to an audit trail with a reason. Nothing changes silently.

The year's fee is raised for all students in one step, not student by student.
Each student can see what they owe from the portal on the school's own site.
Card payments are recorded only once Stripe confirms the money moved.
Cash and cheque payments can be entered by hand with a sequenced receipt number.
Waivers and corrections are recorded with a reason in the audit trail.

Messages that know who has and has not paid

Because fees and student records are in the same office, the office already knows which students have unpaid fees. You can write to that group directly — without exporting a list, opening a separate email tool, or pasting in addresses from somewhere else.

You can also write to all students, to a specific Department, to the people attending a particular event, or to newsletter subscribers. Messages can be written now and scheduled to send later, and the office guarantees a message is never sent twice.

Send to all students, a Department, event attendees, students with unpaid fees, or chosen individuals.
Messages can be scheduled to send at a later time.
A message is guaranteed never to be sent twice.

What this guide does not cover

It is worth being direct about the limits here. The core frustration of fragmented tools is that the same data has to be re-entered across separate systems, and each entry point is a place where mistakes can appear. No fact about Daviah states that separate tools are fully replaced or that data entered once automatically flows everywhere without any re-entry at all. The switching between systems and the mistakes that come from gaps between them are only partially answered by what is described here.

If your school has other specialist systems for attendance registers, medical records or learning management, those connections are not part of what Daviah provides. If cost and complexity are also a concern, there is a separate guide on pricing and what the free plan includes.

Questions

Do I have to enter every student's details by hand when I start?

You can bring existing records in from a CSV spreadsheet. Columns are matched automatically, and any problems or duplicates are shown to you before anything is saved.

Can I send a fee reminder only to students who have not paid?

Yes. The office can send a message specifically to members with unpaid dues — in a school's words, students with unpaid fees — without you needing to build that list yourself.

What do students or parents see if they log in to the portal?

Students sign in to a private portal on the school's own site where they can see their record, view what they owe, and pay by card when Stripe is connected.

What happens if a fee amount needs to be corrected after it has been recorded?

Waivers, voids and corrections are the Treasurer's decision and are written to an audit trail with a reason, so nothing changes silently.

What does it cost to use the members and fees tools?

The members office, fees tracking, messaging and the student portal are included on the Website and Members plan at $79.99 a month, or $819.99 a year. There is no contract. The free plan lets you build and preview the site without paying, but the office tools require a paid plan.

Does the office use school words or generic software words?

A school sees its own terminology throughout the office — Students, Fees, Departments and so on — rather than the generic words that other kinds of organisation use.

Student records, fees and messages — without the tab-switching