The short version
Setting an academic year does not change or hide any of your data. It records which dates your institute treats as its current academic year. No student, attendance, exam, result or fee record is ever copied, moved, archived or deleted, and every past year stays fully visible, reportable and printable.
On its own it restricts nothing. Restrictions only begin if you choose them, in the What the academic year governs panel at the bottom of the screen.
Where it is
Core → Academic Duration. It is a privileged screen: an administrator has to grant Core Settings :: Academic Duration in Admin → Users & Privileges before it appears.
Adding a year
- Name — whatever your school calls it, e.g. 2026-27. The name is only a label; the dates are what the system uses.
- Applies to — All campuses, or one campus. A campus with its own academic year uses that one; every other campus follows the "All campuses" year. If your login is limited to certain campuses, the "All campuses" option is not offered.
- Starts / Ends — the first and last day of the year.
Two academic years for the same campus cannot cover the same day; the screen names the year your dates clash with.
Opening and closing
A new year is created as Not started. Open makes it the current year, and closes whichever year was open for the same scope — the confirmation names that year first. Closing a year does one thing: it stops being the current year. Its records are untouched, and you can Reopen it at any time.
If you close a year and open nothing in its place, your institute has no current academic year and everything behaves as it did before you used this screen.
Deleting
A year that has never been opened can be deleted; that removes only the dates you typed. A year that has been in use is part of your school's history and cannot be deleted — close it instead. The button stays visible but disabled, and its tooltip says why.
What the academic year governs
For each area you choose what happens when somebody records something dated outside your academic year:
- Not enforced — the default. Nothing is restricted.
- Warn only — the record is saved and a note is shown.
- Block — the record is refused, with a message naming the year.
The areas are Student Attendance, Employee Attendance, Examinations (the exam dates on an award list) and Parents App visibility.
Allow before start / Allow after end are how many days either side of the year a record may still be entered. Attendance is often written up a few days late, so a few days after the end is normal.
You must have a year open before you can switch any of these on — with no year open there is nothing to enforce against.
Three things these settings never do
- Fees are never affected. Fee challans, payments, discounts, defaulter lists and every fee report sit permanently outside the academic year. Arrears from last year are still owed this year, so fee collection is never restricted by it.
- Reports and printing are never affected. No report, print or export is limited by the academic year. Last year's report cards, fee reports and attendance registers stay printable after the year is closed.
- An existing record can always be deleted. A row that is already there — including one with an old or mistyped date — can be removed whatever its date, so a mistake can always be tidied up. Changing a record dated outside the year is treated the same as creating one: under Block it is refused. If you need to correct old dated records, set the area back to Warn only while you do it.
Gate devices — QR, biometric and face attendance — are not connected to this feature at all and are never affected by these settings.
What you will see on the attendance screens
Once an area is set to Warn only or Block and a year is open, the screens that list a date range — View/Update Attendance and Employee Attendance — mark every row whose date falls outside the year with an Outside year tag, and say how many there are above the list. Under Block those are the rows that will be refused if you save; the rest of your changes still save normally.
Nothing is ever hidden. Rows outside the year are shown exactly as before — they are the rows you most often open these screens to fix.
The Parents App
Setting Parents App visibility limits what a parent sees to the academic year: attendance, the daily diary and the marks summary. Fee details are never limited, and neither are published date sheets and roll number slips — once you publish a document it stays available.
Parents can switch to a previous academic year and read it. That view is read only: choosing an old year never lets anything be written into it.
The Year-end panel
Each academic year has a Year-end button. It opens a summary of what is still outstanding for that year — how many days carry attendance, how many award lists are still awaiting marks, and how many students are on the roll — with a link to the screen where each one is done.
It only shows and links. There is no action button on the panel, and following a link never arrives with anything already selected for you. Promotion in particular is done on Class Transfer, in whatever order suits your school; nothing on this panel moves a student.
The figures are for information only — none of them prevents you from closing the year, and none of them changes a record. The attendance figure is counted against weekdays, so a lower number is normal: the system does not know your holidays.
History
Every creation, date change, opening, closing and settings change is recorded with the user who did it and when. Press History on any row to see it.
An academic year is not a "Session"
Core → Sessions is a separate, older list and stays exactly as it is. Many schools use a Session as a student batch (including two-year batches), a student category, or even an exam name — so it is not a calendar and has no dates. Academic Duration is your calendar. Changing one does not affect the other.