Weekend School Management Software for Mosques

Most weekend schools run on four spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group. One file has the class lists. One has who paid. A teacher keeps the register on paper and photographs it. And the office answers the same three questions all week: when does my child’s class meet, how much do I still owe, and who do I tell that she will be away on Saturday.

None of those four artifacts agrees with the others by October.

Muin’s education module is built for exactly that school. Here is what it now does, in the order you would actually set it up.

One program holds the term

A program is one school: its term dates, its tuition, its registration form, and everything taught inside it. Create it once, and the term dates generate every session every class will meet. You never add a session by hand.

Inside the program, three pieces of vocabulary are optional and all three are genuinely optional:

Levels are the rungs a child progresses along. A Qur’an memorization program has no rungs at all, and its setup never asks for any.
Subjects are what you teach. Enter one once and tick the levels it serves.
Groups are who is taught together. A group may sit at no level, which is how “Grade 1 and Grade 2 Boys” is expressed when a year is small.

A level belongs to one program, so two programs can each teach a “Grade 3” without colliding, and a group cannot be tagged with the other program’s rung.

A class keeps one register, however often it meets

A class is one subject taught to one group, with a teacher and a time. Tuesday at 5pm and Saturday at 10am is one class, not two, and it keeps one register.

Each meeting time can carry its own room and its own teacher for that weekday, which is how a class taught by two people on two days works. Each can also have its own start and end dates, which is how a Ramadan timetable that replaces the regular one for a few weeks is expressed without cloning anything.

Then there is the part that saves an afternoon: the timetable catches what nobody blocks at assignment time. Teacher in two places. Room double-booked. A group with two classes at once, which means its children are booked twice. No teacher assigned. No meeting time. A subject you say you teach that nobody is scheduled to teach. Each one named, with the two classes it is about.

Enrolled is not the same as placed

This is the distinction that makes the start of term survivable.

Enrolled means the child has a place at your school, and if you charge, they are being billed. Placed means they have been put into the actual classes they attend, which is what gives them a register, a room and a teacher.

At the start of term most children are the first and not the second. The Class enrollment screen exists for exactly that gap: the queue of children still waiting for a class, next to the classes they could go into, with a button that places all of them into their suggested groups at once. Placing a child into a group puts them into every class that group attends.

It also handles the thing families actually do on a form. Asked for their child’s grade, a parent writes their state-school year, or a level from another masjid, or something only their household uses. Muin keeps exactly what they typed, flags the child, and never refuses the form. You resolve it when you place them.

The register, five ways

A school should not have to change how it works to fit software. So attendance can be taken by the teacher on the web, by the teacher on a phone with an offline queue, by the office on a live session board, by a badge scan at the door, or at a kiosk tablet.

Every one of them writes the same row into the same register, so the reports do not care which you used. The register itself is default-present with one Save, because correcting the exceptions is faster than ticking forty children.

Two settings matter more than they look:

One register a day, or one per class. A school where a year group stays together all morning marks them once and uses the subject timetable to report which lesson they were in.
Student attendance, not recorded. A school that pays teachers but does not track pupils turns it off, and the student rosters and reports are absent rather than sitting there empty. Teacher hours are untouched.

And who is scanning decides what happens: a child’s scan marks attendance, a teacher’s scan clocks them in for pay. One rule, applied everywhere, so a teacher can never be marked present as a pupil.

Tuition that matches what you advertised

A program is priced one of two ways, and never both: a rate per period, or a committed total split into installments. A school that once entered its yearly total and a monthly rate billed families ten times what it had published, which is why the combination is now refused outright.

On top of that: a registration fee, a late fee, a billing day, a grace period so a family enrolling mid-period is not charged twice, which payment frequencies a family may pick for themselves, and a sibling discount percentage that comes off every child after the first, flat, with one piece of code working it out so the quote, the charge and the report cannot drift apart.

Families can pay online, or at the office by check or cash, or you can allow both and let them choose. A family who picked the office is enrolled immediately, marked as awaiting payment, and shows on your screens as a balance somebody has to chase rather than one that will simply be charged. When the check arrives you record it, one check covers the household, and Muin splits it across siblings.

Tuition owed then answers the weekly question across every program at once: who owes us money, biggest balance first, aged, and separated into what the office must collect and what a card will handle. An offline family gets a balance reminder automatically a week after enrolling and then every two weeks until they are square, and it stops on its own.

Teacher hours reach payroll without a timesheet

Assign a teacher of record per class. A paid teacher must be a linked employee, because their hours post to payroll; a volunteer teacher must have a volunteer role, because their hours go to volunteer reporting and mint no pay. Muin checks that at the moment you assign them, not at the end of the month.

Hours are submitted when a session is ended from the live board. The close-out clocks out anyone still clocked in, caps the clock-out at the scheduled end time so a forgotten punch is not paid until midnight, and never invents hours that have not happened yet.

Two reads, deliberately at two permission levels: hours and pay for whoever runs payroll, and a staffing view of exactly the same sessions for a coordinator who should not see anyone’s salary.

The parent portal is where the phone calls go

Families sign in with a code sent to the email or phone you already hold, with no password to forget. Each parent sees only their own children, and for each child: the classes, when they next meet, how attendance is tracking, their marks, where the household stands on tuition with a statement to download, and the term dates they can add to a phone.

What they can do themselves is the part that empties the office inbox:

Report an absence, recorded as excused before the session.
Pay tuition, per child or all at once, and manage their own card.
Sign a progress sheet, and reply to the teacher on it.
Book a parent-teacher meeting slot.
Ask for an early pickup, or for a named adult to collect, chosen from the child’s own authorized list.
Ask to change class, change their tuition plan, or correct a detail on their child’s record.
Read and sign your family handbook.
Re-enroll for next term.

Every one of those arrives with you as a request, not as a change.

The record of a term

Assessments and marks live on the class gradebook, with due dates and a finalize step that locks the marking and can be reopened by the same person who locked it.

If your handbook says the grade is part exam, part attendance and part participation, you can say so: categories and weights are set once per program, and attendance credit uses the same lateness the register already computed, so the two cannot disagree. Pass rules give each child a standing of on track, at risk, or not enough evidence, and a rule nobody has fed yet is undecided rather than failed.

For a memorization program, the daily sheet is the record. A teacher fills one row per child, counters add up as they type, it works offline on a phone, and nothing reaches the family until the teacher publishes it. Then the parent signs it with one button.

Marks reach families when an admin releases them, not while a teacher is still typing. Each child’s family then gets one message, and a progress, midterm or final report card prints as a PDF from released marks only, in your school’s own template, language and grade style. Parents download it from the family portal. One gap remains, and it is better to say so than to let you discover it in November: there is no transcript across terms.

Teachers can post the week’s plan on Monday and the recap on Friday, and families can get one weekly email per class and one digest per child. Every parent message is off until you turn it on, and can be set per level or per class. Text messages to guardians exist too, but they stay off for an organization until it has been reviewed and enabled, and they reach only guardians who consented to texts.

Starting

If you already run a school, the fastest path is a guided setup that asks one question at a time and lets you skip whatever your school does not use. Rooms, teachers, the program, levels if you have them, subjects, groups, classes, children, then families.

If you are moving off spreadsheets, start with one program and one term. Build the timetable, import the roster, place the children, and open the register. The tuition and the portal can follow a week later, and the parents will notice that part first.

Questions about your own setup? Ask Muin inside the app, or read the education documentation.