Almost every school starts new software with a student list in Excel, or on paper registers, or in a mix of both. The list is rarely clean. One class is written as 5th, another as Class-5, a third as V. Phone numbers have spaces, dashes or a missing zero. The same child appears twice.
Fixing these things before you import takes less time than fixing them afterwards in the system. This guide covers what to check.
1. One row per student
Each student should be on one row. Do not put brothers and sisters on a single row, and do not leave blank rows between classes. If your sheet has a heading row with the class name in the middle of the list, you can still import it, but it is easier if every row says its own class.
2. The columns you need
- Admission number (unique for each student).
- Student name.
- Father's name, and the father's CNIC if you have it.
- Class and section.
- Date of birth and gender.
- A parent phone number.
- Previous dues or advance paid, if you want to start with correct fee balances.
3. Make class names consistent
Choose one spelling for each class and use it everywhere. Class 5, 5th and V should all become one name. Play Group, PG and Playgroup should become one. Match them to the names you will use in the new system, so students do not end up in classes with similar but different names.
4. Fix phone numbers
Pakistani mobile numbers are normally written as 03xx followed by seven digits. Remove spaces and dashes, and put back a leading zero that Excel may have dropped. Phone numbers matter because WhatsApp alerts and parent logins depend on them.
5. Check dates
Dates of birth are a common source of errors. Make sure Excel stores them as real dates and not text, and that day and month are not swapped.
6. Look for duplicates
Sort by admission number and by name. Look for the same admission number twice, the same name in the same class, and the same name and father in two classes. Decide which row to keep.
7. Handle families carefully
A shared phone number does not mean a shared family. Two children with the same phone number but different fathers should stay separate. Adding the father's CNIC makes this exact. Group by father, not by phone number.
8. Decide how to start the fee balances
If some students owe fees from before, enter that amount in a previous dues column. If some have paid in advance, enter it as an advance. Check the total of each against your books before you import, so the opening numbers in the new system agree with the old ones.
9. Try a small batch first
Import one class, check it and then import the rest. If something is wrong, you have only one class to fix.
Doing this in Skoo
Skoo accepts a clean Excel or CSV sheet, a messy sheet with class headings in the middle, a PDF with text, a scanned PDF, and photos of registers or admission forms. A clean sheet loads without AI. For a messy one, Skoo reads the layout once and applies it to every row. Class names such as 5th, Class-5 and V become Class 5 and are matched to your own class names. Phone numbers are put into the 03xx format, and Excel date cells for date of birth are read correctly.
You see a preview you can edit, and you can look at only the rows that need checking. If the list has previous dues or advances, you confirm the totals before they are saved. Children are grouped by father, and an imported phone number that already has a parent login is reused only when the father matches. Import adds students. It does not update existing students from a new sheet.
For seven days you can undo the whole import, unless a fee payment has been taken against the imported students. AI reading can misread a blurred photo, so always read the preview. See importing students in Skoo.