The front office

The reception desk: who enquired, who walked in, who complained, and what was posted. Minutes a day, and it replaces four paper registers.

Sidebar → Front Office

Four registers, one dashboard. This is the module your receptionist lives in, and the one where the Receptionist role earns its keep — it grants exactly these four screens and nothing else.

This is a licensed module

If Front Office does not appear in your sidebar, your plan does not include it. Ask your provider.

Admission enquiries

Every "do you have a place for my daughter in Class 4?" — logged, assigned and chased.

Admission Enquiries → Add

Field	Required	Notes
Student name	Yes	The child, not the caller
Class	Yes	The class they are asking about
Parent name	Yes
Phone	Yes
Enquiry date	Yes
Email, source, notes	No	Source is worth filling — see below
Assigned to	No	The staff member who owns this enquiry
Follow-up date	No	When to chase

Following up

Open the enquiry and record a follow-up: the date, what the parent said, and when to call next.

Response	Meaning
Interested	Still live
Call Back	They asked you to try later
Undecided	Genuinely deciding
No Response	Nobody picked up
Not Interested	Closed

Recording a follow-up moves a Pending enquiry to Followed-up automatically, and rolls the enquiry's follow-up date forward to whatever you set as the next one.

Statuses on the enquiry itself: Pending, Followed-up, Admitted, Lost.

Fill in the source, and you get an admissions report for free

"Where did you hear about us" — newspaper, referral, hoarding, website. Six months of that field answers the question every school owner asks at budget time: which advertising actually worked.

Marking an enquiry Admitted does not admit the student

It is a status on the enquiry, nothing more. The actual admission is a separate job on Student Admission. Two different screens, deliberately — an enquiry is a sales record, an admission is a legal one.

Visitor book

Visitor Book → Add as someone arrives.

Field	Required
Visitor name	Yes
Phone	Yes
Purpose	Yes
Person to meet	Yes
ID card number, notes	No
Photo	No — upload, or capture from the desk camera

Then check out when they leave, and print a visitor card if your school issues badges.

The value is entirely in the checkout

A visitor book that records arrivals but never departures cannot answer the only question that matters in an incident: who is still in the building. Make checking out part of handing back the badge.

Complaints

A logged complaint is one you can prove you handled.

Field	Required
Complainant name	Yes
Phone	Yes
Type	Yes — your own categories: transport, staff conduct, facilities
Description	Yes
Complaint date	Yes
Assigned to	No — the staff member who will deal with it

Assign every complaint to a person. An unassigned complaint is a complaint nobody owns.

Postal records

Incoming and outgoing post, both in one register.

Field	Required
Type	Yes — dispatch or receive
From and to	Yes
To address	Yes
Date	Yes
Reference number	No — the courier tracking number
Notes	No

Small, dull, and the thing that settles the argument about whether the transfer certificate was ever posted.

Who should have this

Give the Receptionist role to your front desk staff. It covers exactly these four screens plus QR attendance, and nothing else — no student records, no fees, no marks.

That is the point: the person at the desk can log a visitor without being able to see what any family owes.

Real example

Apex Academy's reception, an ordinary Tuesday:

• 6 admission enquiries logged, 4 assigned to the admissions coordinator with follow-up dates
• 11 visitors in and out, 2 still showing as inside at 4pm — both traced to badges not handed back
• 1 complaint about a bus route, assigned to the transport in-charge
• 3 postal entries, all dispatch

Their one change after a month: making "source" mandatory in practice, by asking it on every call. Six months later it showed 60% of enquiries came from parent referrals and almost none from the newspaper advert they had been renewing for years.

Common problems

What you see	Cause
Front Office is missing from the sidebar	The module is not included in your plan
A receptionist cannot open a screen	Their role is missing that specific front-office permission
Visitors are still shown as inside days later	Nobody checked them out
An enquiry marked Admitted but the child is not in the system	Marking the enquiry does not create the student. Admit them properly
Follow-up dates keep going stale	Nobody is assigned. Set Assigned to on every enquiry
The photo will not capture at the desk	Browser camera permission, or the desk has no camera. Upload a file instead