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The School Management System (SMS) is an online solution built for organizing data for school administrators. SMS is built upon our custom Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system allowing us to quickly and securely store and maintain data.
The SMS system uses simple to remember icons to allow administrators easy and quick access through the advanced functionality. The previous graphic shows both the main icons for the SMS system with icons for the add-on suites for Homework Central and Hot Lunch.
The most basic and important piece of information contained within SMS is the contact records themselves. The system presents itself with the utmost basic of contact information including name, address, E-Mail, and phone. However, SMS is able to handle other data as well, specifically set to your needs and individual setup.
When accessing the contact records, the SMS system uses our own CRM system. There are three main functions that you can perform on the main SMS system and that is to search, create, or set search groups.
The search function is really as simple as it sounds. You are able to search by any set data field and are able to use wildcards as well. A wildcard is a “*” which simply means that the word may have anything either before or after it. For example to find all your students whose first name starts with the letter J, you would enter like this.
To make a search on your records, simply enter in the criteria for the search and click the Execute Search button on the right. The number of records found will be immediately shown. If you want to pull all the records at once, just don’t enter any criteria and execute the search.
The SMS system can also store a multitude of other data on any contact record. We are able to digitally create unlimited other data fields and criteria for each of those fields. Some examples might include company name, billing address, or shipping address. When setup for your implementation, you will find these other fields under the master and extra custom fields as shown here.
When you have completed your search criteria and have found that there are more than one returned results, just click the view results button. While some of the data shown does not have all the fields filled in, also some of your contact data may miss fields as well. That is not a problem.
This is the CRM List screen, which shows you the results of the search you just launched. In this list format you can reorder the list by simply clicking on any of the column names. The CRM List screen also allows you to quickly and easily export this list to either Microsoft Word or Excel.
If you want to look at the details of a particular contact or want to make changes to it, just click on the pen icon to the left of any name. This will bring you to the CRM Edit Contact page. You will see all the same data as found in the search page, but now will be able to directly make changes to that data.
When opening up a particular contact record, it is no longer necessary to go back and run the search again to get to another returned record from your search. Notice the result number on the upper left of the screen. By clicking on either the forward or backward green arrows found at the top of this screen, you will be able to quickly step through the results of your search without having to go back and rerun it over and over. This functionality makes making quick changes to multiple records a snap.
The second main function found on the main CRM screen is to create a new contact. This screen looks exactly like the search screen, and contains much of the same information. This user friendly interface will make entering new contacts quick and seamless.
The third option on the CRM screen allows administrators to easily add or remove search groups. Search Groups are simply flags set on contact records in order to make organization easier. The search groups are also essential for the School Hot Lunch suite add-on.
 School Years
The SMS system organizes all the grade and class information based on the particular school year. This means that there is no need to reenter student or teacher data from year to year. There can only be a single school year active at a single time, however there is no need to delete old ones. Keep them for a data repository and backup for class information.
You may notice some important options found at the bottom of the school year report. They are the CRM Groups. This system uses the preset CRM search groups that we already discussed and setup earlier. These are essential for when we get to setting up your school classes with teachers and students.
 Grades
As intuitive as it sounds, you are able to make unlimited grades and give them traditional numeric values or something else based on your needs. Each set of grades is saved per the school year that is selected on the top of the screen.
 Classes
Create an unlimited number of classes for each school year. You can give the class any name you choose and assign one or more teachers to it. This is also where you assign students to the class. The list of teachers and students is based on the CRM Search groups as covered earlier.
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