Open your school in 24 hours.

The signup wizard is two short steps. First, your school — name, country, school type, estimated student count, phone. Then your admin account — your name, email, a password, and accepting the terms. That's it. Behind the scenes, YESS provisions your tenant: 13 default roles, a default grading scale, the current academic year and its three terms, your language settings, and a 30-day free trial. The brand starts on the YESS kente palette until you make it yours (Step 5).

When you land on the dashboard, every module is already wired. You just don't have any data in yet — that's the next four steps.

Open the Staff Directory and click Add staff — a name, an employee ID, department, campus, and whether they teach. Add as many people as you like. Then open Account management → Credentials to issue each one a login: YESS mints a matricule and a temporary password you can reveal on screen or print as a credential slip to hand over.

Assign each account its role from the Accounts tab. Roles map to permission sets — a principal sees what a principal sees; a bursar sees finance and HR but not academic settings. Permissions can be tuned later, so start with the defaults.

Open Students and click Add student. The form captures the child's details, their class and section, and links to a parent or guardian. Students also arrive through the Admissions flow, which turns an accepted applicant into an enrolled student on a class roster — with sibling lookup along the way.

A note on honesty: a one-click bulk Excel/CSV importer is not yet built. You can export a roster to CSV today, but new students are added through the form (or Admissions) one record at a time. Bulk import is on the roadmap.

A default grading scale was created when you signed up. To add or change one, open Grading systems (its own page in the sidebar, not under Settings). Start from a preset — Cameroon GCE, French Bac (0-20), IB (1-7), IGCSE (9-1), US 4.0 GPA, percentage-with-letters, or blank — then tune the grade boundaries (letter, score range, GPA points). Assign each programme to a grading system; a school default applies otherwise.

Multi-system schools (GCE + IB under one roof) configure both here. The gradebook surfaces the right one per programme automatically; the teacher never sees the mapping logic.

Open Settings → Branding. Upload your logo and set your brand colours — primary, secondary, and accent — plus optional header and sidebar chrome, a font, and theme presets. Your motto lives one tab over, on Settings → Profile. The identity flows everywhere: report-card PDFs, parent notifications, every page header.

The pillar palette — green, gold, navy, purple — is the YESS spine. Your colours run alongside it. The effect: YESS feels like your school, not like a generic SaaS tenant.

Your dashboard shows the modules you've turned on. Today's attendance, this term's grades to enter, this week's fees, parent messages waiting. The school is in your hand.

From here, dive into the modules.