One parent. Three children.
One message.
Imara runs the whole school on one system: admissions, fees, payments, parent SMS, attendance, report cards and operations. Built for schools in Uganda, on the bandwidth and the phones they actually have.
One message per parent
However many children they have, and whichever sections those children are in.
The school's own address
Its own subdomain from day one, or a domain the school already owns.
Separated underneath
A record is only reachable through the school it belongs to. Enforced in the database.
The SMS bill
One character can triple what a term of reminders costs.
The same message, the same 155 characters, sent to the same parent. The only difference is the apostrophe in the school's name.
Thank you. St Mary's Memorial School
GSM-7straight apostrophe · 160 characters per segment
Segments
1
Cost
UGX 40
Thank you. St Mary’s Memorial School
UCS-2curly apostrophe, pasted from Word · 67 characters per segment
Segments
3
Cost
UGX 120
Corrected when you save
Smart quotes, dashes and ellipses are replaced with GSM equivalents before a template is stored, not discovered on the invoice.
Costed before you send
Recipient count, total segments, shilling cost, and who was excluded and why. Every send is previewed.
Run it twice, it sends once
The message id is the idempotency key, so a retried cron or a second click cannot bill the school again.
What it runs
The whole school, not one corner of it.
Every part writes to the same record. That is the point, and it is the thing three separate systems and a spreadsheet can never do.
Pupils and guardians
Records, classes and status history. Guardians linked to every child they answer for. Admissions from enquiry to enrolment, numbered automatically. Bulk import from the spreadsheet you already keep.
Fees and payments
Fee structures per class, per term, per section. Invoices raised for a whole class in one pass. Payments receipted, reversible and audited. Mobile money, cash and bank reconciled the same way.
Attendance and teaching
Daily registers per class. Subjects, teaching assignments, schemes of work and lesson plans. Mark sheets that keep a local draft while you type, so a dropped connection costs nothing.
Report cards
Grade bands set per school. Teacher remarks and computed positions, ready to print. The balance on the card is the balance in the receipt book, because it is the same record.
Operations
Staff and payroll. Expenses against the money coming in. Inventory, stock movements and procurement with approval. An asset register. Money in against money out, for the owner.
Insight
Precomputed rollups, so a dashboard never scans a term of marks. Pupils flagged early on attendance, results or arrears, with a reason for every point. Interventions logged against the pupil.
For parents
No app. No password. No bundle worth mentioning.
A parent gets a link by SMS. The link is the credential: signed, expiring, and revocable from the guardian's page the moment a phone changes hands.
A parent who can check the balance themselves is a parent the bursar does not have to phone. Schools notice that within a term.
St Mary's Memorial School
Term 2 2026 · Grace Kato
Ann Kato
P4
UGX 120,000
Joel Kato
P6
UGX 150,000
Total due
UGX 270,000
Results and attendance below · Receipt SCH-PR-0412
Your address
The school's name on the door.
Every school gets its own address. Staff sign in there, parents open links from there, and the sign-in page carries the school's name, not ours.
Separation is enforced underneath rather than asked for politely. A staff account from one school is refused at another school's address even with the right password.
Roles
Everyone sees their own work.
Enforced on the server and again in the database rules, not by hiding a link in the menu. A teacher who types the payments URL by hand is stopped twice.
| Administrator | Bursar | Teacher | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pupils and guardians | Yes | Yes | Read |
| Invoices and payments | Yes | Yes | No |
| Reverse a payment | Yes | No | No |
| Send SMS | Yes | Yes | No |
| Marks and report cards | Yes | No | Yes |
| Staff accounts and terms | Yes | No | No |
Start with one term.
We set the school up, bring across the pupil list you already have, and run one term of fees and reminders alongside you. Tell us how many pupils, how many sections, and what you are using now. That is enough for us to say whether Imara is worth your time.
Talk to us
imaratechug@gmail.com0778 281 586Chat on WhatsAppVisit us
Amazon Building, 4th Floor, High Street, Mbarara