Certificates & credentials.

Every school issues certificates — honour rolls, diplomas, long-service awards, training completions. Almost every school issues them the same way: a Word template, a printer, a signature, and a hope that nobody ever needs to check whether the one in front of them is genuine.

YESS rebuilds the whole pipeline around a single idea: the certificate is a record in a database first, and a sheet of paper second. You design the look once in a canvas studio. You define the rules that decide who earns one. The platform issues them — automatically when a report card is published, or in bulk when you press a button — with a unique, per-category number. And every certificate carries a QR code that resolves to a public verdict page: verified, revoked, or not found. No login. No phone call to the school.

Design once. Issue at scale. Verify forever.

Everything starts at /dashboard/certificates. Two KPI rails sit at the top: the first counts issued certificates by category — academic, behavior, attendance, training, service, general — and the second totals all certificates, students, staff, and the share that were auto-issued. Beneath them are three tabs.

Issued lists every certificate the school has granted, filterable by category and by recipient (all / student / staff). Each card shows the title, an auto-issued or verified badge, the recipient, the certificate number, the issue date, a download/print link, and — when the certificate is not revoked — a public-verify link. Rules holds the auto-issue policies. Templates holds the canvas designs, each a doorway into the studio.

Across the top of the hub sits the bulk-issue toolbar (shown to staff with the certificates.manage permission): Honor Roll, Perfect Attendance, Service Years, and a link to the diplomas backfill. One press of any of these issues a batch of certificates from live academic, attendance, or HR data — the subject of chapter four.

From the Templates tab, New template captures a name, a category, a recipient type (student or staff), an optional certificate type, and a letterhead, then drops you into the canvas studio at /dashboard/certificates/studio/[id]. The studio is three panes — a toolbox, the canvas, and a properties panel — with undo/redo (50 steps deep), zoom, snap-to-grid, and a page you can set to A4 landscape, A4 portrait, or US Letter.

You build the certificate from fifteen element types, grouped in the toolbox: the star elements (recipient name, award title, award body, signature line); the decorative ones (seal, ribbon, border frame, divider, watermark); identity (school crest, free text, image); and verification (QR verify, date block, certificate number). Each element has geometry in millimetres, typography, and type-specific options — a seal's motif (star, wreath, ribbon-banner, shield), a border frame's style (classic, double-rule, kente, ornate, minimal), and so on.

The text on a certificate is written with tokens — {{recipient_name}}, {{award_title}}, {{school_name}}, {{issued_date}}, {{certificate_number}}, the principal and director names, the academic year, and more. In the studio they resolve to sample values so you can see the layout; at print time they resolve to the real recipient's data. Six starter skeletons — Classic Gold, Modern Minimal, Kente Heritage, Royal Plum, Service Anniversary, and Training Completion — give you a designed starting point in one click.

The Rules tab is where a certificate stops being something a registrar remembers to print and becomes something the platform issues on its own. A rule carries a name, a category, a recipient type, a certificate type, a designed template, a condition (stored as JSON — for example {"min_average": 80} or {"max_absences": 0}), and a trigger.

The trigger is the moment the rule fires: on_term_close, on_year_close, on_attendance_threshold, on_training_complete, on_anniversary, or manual. When a report card is published, YESS walks the active academic rules: any student whose average clears the rule's threshold is issued the rule's certificate automatically, through a database trigger. When a training enrolment is marked complete, the training rule fires. When a student's status flips to graduated, a diploma is issued. The registrar presses nothing.

Some certificates are issued in a deliberate batch rather than by an automatic trigger, and the hub's toolbar handles those.

Honor Roll scans the published report cards for a term and issues a certificate to every student whose average clears the threshold (80% by default). Perfect Attendance scans the attendance records within the term's dates and issues to every student at or under the absence limit. Service Years reads staff hire dates and issues anniversary certificates at the milestone years — five, ten, fifteen and up — promoting the longest tenures to a long-service award. Every batch is idempotent and writes each certificate with auto_issued set and a record of the event that triggered it.

Diplomas have their own screen at /dashboard/certificates/issue-diplomas. It shows two numbers — graduates still without a diploma, and diplomas already issued — and a year picker. Issue diplomas backfills a diploma for every graduated student in that year who does not already have one. The same diploma is issued automatically the instant a student's status becomes graduated; this screen is the catch-up for a cohort graduated before the school came onto YESS.

Every certificate carries a number that is unique within the school and allocated atomically per category and year. The format is a category prefix, the year, and a running sequence — ACA-2026-00001 for academic, BHV for behaviour, ATT for attendance, TRN for training, SVC for service, and a general prefix for the rest. That number is the certificate's identity: it is printed on the sheet, encoded in the QR code, and is the key the public verification page looks up.

Under the number sits the record itself. A certificate knows its title, its certificate type (one of twenty-one — from honor_roll and graduation to perfect_attendance, service_anniversary and training_completion), its category, its recipient (a student or a staff member — never both), the design it was rendered from, whether it was auto-issued, and whether it has been revoked and why.

From any certificate in the Issued list, the download link opens the print surface at /certificates/print/[id] — the certificate rendered at its true physical size, with the real recipient's name and the real, scannable QR code, ready for the browser's Save as PDF or a direct print. The same shared renderer that drew the studio canvas draws this sheet, so the printed page matches the design pixel for pixel.

Distribution reaches beyond the office. When a certificate is issued, a notification fans out to the recipient — a student and their parents, or a staff member — and the certificate appears in their portal. A student sees their own awards at /portal/certificates, where they can download or re-verify any of them.

This is the chapter that makes the credential worth the paper. Scanning the QR code — or visiting /verify/[number] with the certificate number — opens a public verdict page that needs no account. It runs against a security-defined function granted to anonymous visitors, so a future employer, a university admissions officer, or a parent can check a certificate from anywhere.

The verdict is deliberately spare. A genuine certificate returns a green Verified · Authentic card with the recipient's name and type, the award category and type, the issuing school, the issue date, and the number. A revoked certificate returns a red Revoked card with the reason. An unknown number returns Certificate not found. Nothing else is exposed — no contact details, no grades, no private school data ever cross the public boundary.

The studio, the rules engine, bulk issue and public verification all ship today. The items below are scaffolded or partial, and are flagged honestly so you can plan around them.

Certificates are the downstream celebration of what other modules record — grades, attendance, service, and graduation.