Admissions & enrolment.

Every student on the roll was once a name on an enquiry. Between those two points lies a process most schools run on a mix of paper forms, a shared inbox, and someone's memory — and it is precisely the process where a school most wants to look organised, because the family is deciding whether to trust it with their child.

YESS makes the whole admissions journey one tracked pipeline. Every applicant, however they arrived, sits at a known stage with a known history. Nothing depends on a sticky note. And because the platform already runs the rest of the school, the handover from "accepted applicant" to "enrolled student" is not a re-typing exercise — it is a single action that creates the student record, links the parent, and writes the first enrolment.

From the first enquiry to the first day, one tracked journey.

The admissions hub at /dashboard/admissions shows every application across a nine-stage funnel: inquiry, applied, documents pending, under review, interview, decision, enrolled, rejected, and waitlisted. A KPI strip totals the applications, how many are still active in the pipeline, the conversion rate, and the rejected count; clickable stage tiles let you filter the table to any one stage.

From here you can add an application by hand, capture a walk-in, export the whole funnel to CSV, and move applications between stages — singly from a row's Move to Stage menu, or in bulk for a selection. Two transitions are deliberately gated: moving to rejected requires a reason (which is logged), and moving to enrolled is never a plain stage flip — it routes through the convert-to-student action so a half-finished enrolment can't be created by accident.

Applications enter the funnel from three directions, and the platform records how each one arrived. A family can apply themselves from the school's public application form at /sites/[school]/apply — their submission lands at the applied stage, flagged self-submitted so staff know it came from outside, and the applicant can track its progress through a magic-link without an account. A staff member can add an application by hand from the hub. And a family that simply walks in is captured on a dedicated screen and tagged as a walk-in.

The walk-in wizard at /dashboard/admissions/walk-in is built for the front desk with a parent standing there. It is one screen in three parts: a sibling lookup that finds an existing student by name and, with Adopt sibling, pre-fills the family name and campus so a second child isn't re-keyed from scratch; the applicant and parent identity fields; and the academic placement — programme, class, campus. Submit, and the family enters the normal pipeline. A walk-in is captured fast, but it is not a shortcut past review — it still flows through the same stages as any other applicant.

Open any applicant and you land in their workspace — a deep single-application view organised into as many as eight rooms. The overview carries the applicant's photo and details, the parent's details, the academic selection, a vitals strip counting their documents, interviews, offers and entry exams, and a "pending requirements" bar that tells you the next thing this application needs. A time-in-stage chip warns when an application has sat too long.

The other rooms are the work itself. Documents — upload and verify supporting files, each marked verified or not. Interviews — schedule and record outcomes and a score. Offers — issue an offer (full, conditional or waitlist) with its conditions and an expiry date, and track whether the family accepts or declines, either in the portal or through a secure accept/decline link. Entry exams — the applicant's candidate records and scores, shown once they have been registered for an entrance test. Notes — an internal, timestamped thread, by author. Outbound — the queue of emails the system has prepared for this family, which you can open in your mail client and mark dispatched. And history — the full stage audit trail. A quick-actions rail puts convert-to-student, edit, print packet, and send-message one click away.

Many schools select on an entrance test, and YESS runs that test end to end. At /dashboard/admissions/entry-exams you create an exam definition — its programme, intake year, name, fee, pass threshold, capacity, and whether it runs on paper, online, or both — then publish it so candidates can be registered against it. The same screen lists the candidate roster with each candidate's total score, rank within the intake, and outcome, and lets you admit, waitlist, or reject directly.

The exam's detail view holds four tabs: papers, a question composer, the candidates, and a marker queue. Questions come in five types — multiple-choice, true/false, numeric (with a tolerance), match, and essay. The first four are auto-marked the moment a candidate submits; essays land in the marker queue, where a staff member reads each answer, scores it, and the candidate's total recomputes. Every attempt also carries anti-cheat signals — tab switches, focus loss and copy/paste events — surfaced as flags for the reviewer, and an attempt that exceeds the allowed number of tab switches is auto-submitted on the spot.

A strong applicant for a full class goes on the waitlist rather than being lost. Moving an application to the waitlisted stage gives it a position, shown as a badge in its workspace, and the hub's Waitlist tab presents the queue in order so you can adjust positions as places open up. When a seat frees, you move the next applicant on from waitlisted to a decision and an offer — they were never out of the process, only paused in it.

This is the step that proves admissions belongs inside the school platform rather than beside it. When an offer is accepted, click Convert to Student from the applicant's workspace. A single operation creates the student's user profile, creates the student record, links the parent (creating the parent's profile too when an email is present), writes the first enrolment against the applied class, and stamps the application as enrolled with the decision timestamp. A welcome notification goes out, and you are taken to the new student's record to place them in a section and attach their documents. If the school charges a registration fee, the overview surfaces it and conversion is held until it is paid. And because an offer can be accepted from its secure link, an accepted offer can trigger the very same conversion on its own.

Because the whole thing runs as one atomic action, you never end up with a student record but no parent, or an enrolment pointing at nothing. The conversion is the bright line between admissions and the rest of the school — and the student journey carries on from there, legible to the family it belongs to.