Overview
Any notification the platform already sends can also go out over WhatsApp or SMS. You do not send these by hand: they ride along with the reminder or the alert you were already sending.
What has to be set up
- WhatsApp — a WhatsApp Business account, and each message type approved by Meta as a template. A business cannot send free-form WhatsApp text to somebody who has not written in first; that is Meta's rule, not ours.
- SMS — an Indian SMS provider account with DLT-registered templates, which Indian telecom regulation requires for business SMS.
Both are account-level configuration. Neither is something you can switch on from your dashboard.
Which notifications go out
The ones that are worth a phone buzzing:
- Fee reminders.
- Absence alerts.
- Notices you post.
- Class reminders.
Where a student has a linked parent, the parent gets their own copy, worded for them and naming the child.
Messages a school pays for
A school's attendance messages normally reach families in the app, through the child's account and the parents linked to it. Many families aren't there yet: a child with no account, or no parent linked. For them a school can switch on WhatsApp or SMS for families not in the app, on the Biometric page under Day rules.
- The message goes to the guardian's phone on the student register, whether or not anyone in the family has an account.
- The school chooses which messages: reached school and left school (from a gate machine), and marked absent (from the daily register or the gate's absence cut-off). On Transport → Settings, it also chooses the bus messages: the bus is near their stop, got on, got off, and wasn't at the stop (see Live bus tracking).
- The same limit covers the code that confirms a phone on the admission enquiry page, and admission campaigns by SMS or WhatsApp (see Admission enquiries), which go only between 9 am and 9 pm.
- Each message is charged to the school, and the school sets a monthly limit (500 to start with). The screen shows how many have gone this month; at the limit, sending stops until the next month.
- A family that can be reached in the app never gets a paid message. Families that can be reached by neither come back to the school as a list to phone.
It uses the same WhatsApp templates and SMS provider as everything else, so it works only once those are set up; until then the screen says so and nothing is sent.
How a channel is chosen
One channel per notification, never both — nobody wants the same fee reminder twice.
- WhatsApp if it is configured and allowed for this person.
- Otherwise SMS.
- Otherwise nothing extra. The in-app notification is sent either way.
Phone numbers
Numbers are normalised before sending, so the ways people actually type them all work: 9829011223, +91 98290-11223, 09829011223 and 919829011223 are the same number.
A landline, or anything that is not a valid Indian mobile, is skipped and recorded as skipped rather than being sent into the void.
Turning channels off
Each person controls this from their own notification settings. They can turn off a whole notification type, or keep the type and turn off WhatsApp or SMS specifically — keeping fee reminders in the app while stopping them arriving on a phone at 9pm.
Muting a type silences every channel for it, which is what muting should mean.
Did it actually arrive?
Every attempt is recorded with what happened: sent, failed, or skipped — and, for the last two, why, in words. A wrong number, an unapproved template and a provider outage look completely different in the log.