AWRA OpsHub Search

For schools & education

The operations engine behind a well-run school

Fees that reconcile themselves, stores that measure the kitchen, procurement on the term calendar, assets with custodians, and payroll with statutory handled — one system for the bursar's whole world.

Sound familiar?

If any of these ring true, you are exactly who this was built for.

The evening matching game

M-Pesa, three banks, cash at the office — and a bursar matching payment narrations to student names after dark.

The store that leaks by the cup

Consumables bought by the lorry, issued by memory — and 10–20% of the spend evaporating between the two.

Week-one buying emergencies

Term dates known for years, yet every term starts with urgent purchases at whatever price was quoted on the phone.

Equipment bought in triplicate

Labs, dorms, and sports stores replacing items nobody can find — an invisible annual tax.

What runs today, and where a school system takes over

Running in the product now

  • Referenced invoicing with automatic M-Pesa matching, receivables aged by bucket, and reminders behind their own permission.
  • An unmatched-receipt queue for payments that arrive without a usable reference, attached by hand to an open invoice.
  • Boarding store control — receipts against purchase orders, issues carrying a reason and a person, blind counts with valued variance, and transfers between stores.
  • Term-cycle procurement with approval thresholds, RFQ comparison, purchase orders and three-way matching.
  • Asset registers with named custodians, movement history, condition on hand-off and recorded disposal.
  • Kenyan statutory payroll — PAYE, NSSF, SHIF and the housing levy — with casuals paid on record.

The school-specific layer — on the roadmap, and commissionable now

  • No student record. The fee payer is a customer, so there is no student entity, no class, no stream and no family grouping — and therefore no arrears by class or by family.
  • No fee structure or fee ledger. Termly fee items, per-class fee schedules, bursaries and pro-rata joiners are all invoices you raise yourself.
  • No bank statement matching. M-Pesa matching works; reconciling a bank statement does not exist.
  • No maintenance schedule on an asset — no service interval, no next-service date. The custody register is real; the service calendar is yours.

What we would decline, and would rather say now

  • We will not build the academic side. Admissions, exams, timetables and report cards belong to a school management system, and the schools that run best on us run one alongside us. This is not a backlog item we have not reached — a teaching-and-learning system is a different product with different users, and building a weak one inside an operations platform would serve nobody.
  • We will not be the system of record for a child. A student's academic history, discipline record and medical notes carry obligations to the family that an operations platform is the wrong place to hold. We will hold the money, the materials, the assets and the payroll, and we will integrate with whatever holds the pupil.

The four items in the middle column are absences rather than positions, and every one of them is commissionable now on the same terms as everything else here — a written specification, a timeline and a price, before any money moves. The evidence that this is a real offer rather than a sales line is Kenya itself, where the eTIMS transmission and the maintained statutory payroll engine were both built exactly this way, because schools and other clients asked for them. We will not name a date on this page, and we will name one in a quote.

The split is clean and worth taking seriously before a demo: the bursar's money, materials, assets and payroll are genuinely covered, and the school — students, classes, fee structures — is not modelled at all. Schools run on us today with the fee payer as a customer, which works when one payer means one bill and gets awkward across a large roll. If you need a student ledger this term, buy a school management system and keep us for stores, procurement, assets and payroll, which is where the leakage actually is.

How teams get started

1

Start with the store

One term of receipts, issues, and counts — the variance report pays for the project by itself.

2

Connect the fees

One referenced invoice per payer, and the unmatched-receipt queue in place of the evening ritual — referenced payments attach themselves, the rest you attach from a list.

3

Govern the term cycle

Procurement plans, asset verification rhythms, and payroll — the full bursar's calendar, systematized.

Questions we are asked here

Frequently asked questions

Does AWRA replace our academic/exams system?

No — it governs the operations side: money, materials, assets, and payroll. Academic systems handle admissions, exams, and timetables; the two coexist, and many schools run both. If your academic system already invoices fees well, start AWRA at stores and procurement.

Can parents pay to a paybill and have it match the right student?

To the right *invoice*, yes, and that is the honest wording. A payment quoting the invoice number attaches to it automatically and updates the balance. It does not match to a student, because there is no student record — the fee payer is a customer, and an admission number works only if you use it as the invoice reference yourself. Unreferenced receipts land in an unmatched queue where you attach them by hand against a list of open invoices; there are no phone-number matching suggestions, and the list is capped at 300 open invoices, which a large school will exceed. Bank statement matching is not built at all — only M-Pesa.

Is this only for boarding schools?

Boarding schools feel the store pain most, but day schools with significant assets, multi-channel fee collection, and staff payroll recover the cost quickly too. Start with the module that hurts most — fees for day schools, stores for boarding.

What does implementation look like around the term calendar?

Go-live is timed to a term boundary: stores open with a count, and fees open with a verified opening balance per payer at term start. One term of parallel discipline and the routines are set — mid-term big-bang migrations are what we avoid. Note that the fee ledger is per customer rather than per student, so a family with three children is one payer unless you choose to create three.

Bring one term to a demo

One store, one term of fee data, one asset room — see the term run governed. Then ask to see a student record, and we will show you the customer that stands in for it; decide from there.