Organisations and users

Organisations is every school, trust, council department and out-of-borough customer. Users is everybody across all of them.

Adding a school

From Add an organisation. What matters most is set here and cannot be set by the school:

• Type — maintained primary, secondary, special, academy, free school, independent, early years, trust, council department, out of borough. It decides eligibility.
• Phase — primary, secondary, special, all-through, nursery. It decides tiered prices.
• URN and DfE number — somebody else's facts about the school.
• The finance customer code — the key into the ledger. A wrong one sends money to the wrong account, which is exactly why a school cannot edit it.
• Trust membership, where the school belongs to one.

Everything else — address, telephone, finance email, number on roll — the school keeps for itself. See your school's own record.

Getting the school started

Create the organisation, then invite one person into it as a School Admin. They invite everybody else. That is the whole of the onboarding: from there the school runs itself, which is the point.

A school with no School Admin

It happens: the only one leaves without passing it on. Find somebody at the school on Users and set the role, or invite a new person into the organisation. It is the one case where City Council has to reach into a school's own people, and it should be rare enough to be worth noticing.

Finding one person

Users searches across every organisation, which is what you want when somebody writes in from an address you do not recognise. It shows their school, their role, their permissions and whether they are active.

Somebody who has moved school

Inviting their existing address into the new school brings their training record with them. Do that rather than creating a second account, or they lose the record and your compliance reporting counts them twice.

Cost centres and codes

Get the customer code right when the organisation is created rather than after the first finance run. A code that is missing or wrong is caught by the pre-flight check before anything is sent, and fixing it then is a five-minute job; fixing it after an invoice has gone out is a credit note. See the finance run.

Closing an organisation

Schools close and merge. Mark the organisation inactive rather than removing it: its orders, contracts and invoice lines are part of the council's own financial history and have to stay true.