Every school event, automatically announced. automatically announced
A single Automatic Alerts screen lists every parent-facing event the school can fire — fee paid, child absent, results published, admit card ready, homework assigned, fine added, and more. The office picks the channels per event with checkboxes, hits Save, and never has to type a routine message again.
The 9 a.m. routine the school office can finally stop doing
In a typical CBSE school in Indore, a junior office assistant arrives at 8:40 a.m., logs into the WhatsApp Web tab on the desk computer, and opens the absentee register the class teachers have just filed. By 9:15 a.m. she has copied 47 student names into 14 different parent group chats, one class at a time, double-checking each paste so a Class 5 absentee message does not land in the Class 8 group. At 11:00 a.m. she does the same thing in reverse — fee receipts for parents whose UPI payments cleared overnight, copy-pasted from the cashier's printout into individual WhatsApp chats. At 3:30 p.m. it is homework. At 5:00 p.m. it is the next day's circular.
This junior staff member exists in almost every Indian school we have visited. Her job is not to think; her job is to copy and paste, accurately, for four hours a day, without making a mistake. When she takes a day off, the principal does it. When she quits, the school posts a hiring ad. Nothing about the work has changed in twenty years, and yet every other line of business in the country has automated this kind of mechanical relay long ago.
Inkwelly's Automatic Alerts replaces that 9 a.m. routine. One screen lists every routine message the school sends to parents — fee paid, child absent, results out, admit card ready, homework posted, fine added, payment link shared, and more. Each row has four checkboxes (WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Push). The office ticks the channels it wants for each alert, hits Save, and the messages start firing on their own from the next event. The junior assistant either gets repurposed to higher-value work, or the school never has to hire that role again.
How the alerts screen actually works
The Automatic Alerts screen is grouped by module. Open the Communications section in the school dashboard, click 'Automatic Alerts', and you see Student Fee at the top (fee paid, payment link shared, payment link reminder, fine added), then Attendance (child absent), then Examinations (result published, admit card issued), then Homework. Roughly ten events out of the box today, each one tied to a real moment in school life. New events appear automatically as Inkwelly's product modules ship them — the school doesn't have to do anything to receive them, except decide which channels to turn on.
Each row has the alert's friendly name on the left, a status pill that says On or Off (with a one-click toggle), and four channel checkboxes on the right. Tick WhatsApp on the 'Fee Payment Received' row to make every successful fee payment auto-send a receipt to the parent's WhatsApp; tick Email on the 'Result Published' row to make the marksheet PDF go out the moment the exam coordinator publishes results. Each channel checkbox is only enabled when Inkwelly has an authored body for that combination — you cannot accidentally tick a channel that will silently no-op. Hover the disabled box and we tell you why (most often the template is still in draft on Meta's side).
When the school changes a row, the change is local to that school — a 'school override' on top of the platform defaults. The override is saved instantly; no migration job, no scheduled re-run. The very next time that event fires, the new channel selection is used. There is no separate 'apply changes' step, and there is no risk of mid-flight messages going on the old setting. The history of every change is in the audit log, with the staff member's name and the timestamp.
Events Inkwelly ships out of the box
- Fee Payment Received — fires when a UPI / cheque / cash / NEFT payment is recorded against an invoice, with the receipt PDF
- Payment Link Shared — fires when an office user sends an outstanding invoice to the parent with a Razorpay payment link
- Payment Link Reminder — fires for the lightweight 'link only' reminder send from the same invoice dialog
- Invoice Details Sent — fires when the school sends invoice details without a payment link (paid copies, info-only resends)
- Fee Receipt Shared — fires from the receipt detail page Send-to-Parent button, with a free-text note and the receipt PDF
- Student Fine Added — fires when a fine is added to a student's fee account, with category and outstanding total
- Attendance Marked Absent — fires when a class teacher marks a student absent (leave-approved absences are excluded)
- Marksheet Published — fires when the exam coordinator publishes a marksheet from Draft to Published
- Admit Card Issued — fires when admit cards are generated for an exam, with the exam start date and download link
- Homework Assigned — fires when homework is published to a class, with subject, title and due date
What the alerts screen looks like in use
Three layers of defaults — platform, group, school
Every alert has three layers of decision. At the platform level, Inkwelly ships sensible defaults that work for the average Indian school — fee receipts on WhatsApp + Email + Push, attendance on WhatsApp + Push, homework on Push, admit cards on WhatsApp + Email. A school group (DPS chain, Delhi Public Schools, Vidya group, a state-board chain) can set its own defaults at the group level so every branch starts from a curated base — say 'we always send SMS for fee receipts because half our parents don't use WhatsApp'. Individual schools can then override any row to suit local reality — a branch in a low-income area can turn SMS off to save cost, or a boarding school can turn Email on for admit cards because the parents are far away.
Idle vs Failed — the dashboard tells the truth
Turning every channel off on an alert makes it Idle — the school has deliberately chosen not to send this event. That's a feature, not a bug; an Indian school running a UPI-heavy collection has every reason to mute SMS receipts entirely. Idle is a clean state. Failed is different — the alert is on, the channel is ticked, but the message is not landing. Maybe the WhatsApp template is still pending Meta approval; maybe the DLT registration is mid-renewal; maybe the email provider is over quota. The alerts screen surfaces both states with different pills, and the 'Needs attention' tab lists every row that needs a school admin to do something. Silence is never accidental in Inkwelly — if a message is not going out, the dashboard says so.
Quiet hours apply by default — parents sleep, OTP still works
No Indian parent wants a homework alert at 11 p.m. or a fee reminder at 6 a.m. on a Sunday. Inkwelly's school settings carry a quiet-hours window (default 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. IST), and every automatic alert that fires inside that window is either dropped or deferred to the next out-of-window slot — the school chooses which. OTP and login codes are exempt; they always go through, regardless of hour, because OTPs are not optional. Quiet hours apply across every channel — WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Push — and they apply across every event the alerts screen lists, so the school never has to remember to add this rule per alert.
Who gets the alert — parent first, with a student fallback
Each automatic alert carries an audience setting: parents only, student only, or both. The platform default for finance events is 'parents only' — the people paying the fees should see the receipt. For academic events (marksheet, admit card, homework) the default is 'student first, fall back to parents' — students get the alert if they have a school-recorded phone or email, otherwise the parents do. The school can flip this on any alert. A boarding school typically routes everything to the student's school account; a primary school routes everything to the parents. Inkwelly never silently drops an alert because the student has no phone — the fallback rule means at least one person hears about it.
“Pehle saari attendance ki messages mujhe roz subah type karni padti thi, har class ke alag group me. Ab Inkwelly ka automatic alert chalu kar diya — mujhe sirf register check karna hai, baaki sab khud chala jata hai parents ke paas. 40 min ki bachat har subah ki.”
Five real Indian school scenarios this saves
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The 9 a.m. absentee blast. Class teachers mark attendance in Inkwelly between 8:45 and 9:10 a.m. The Attendance Marked Absent alert fires once per absent student, with the class and section in the message body. Parents get a WhatsApp + Push at 9:15 a.m. — same time the school office used to send them manually, except now nobody had to type a single message.
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The UPI receipt at 11:42 p.m. A parent in Pune pays the next month's fees via UPI on a Sunday night while watching cricket. The payment lands in Inkwelly via Razorpay webhook; the Fee Payment Received alert fires; quiet hours hold the WhatsApp delivery until 8 a.m. Monday. The receipt PDF arrives the moment the parent's phone wakes up. No 'where is my receipt' call to the office on Monday morning.
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Pre-board admit cards, all 240 in one go. The exam coordinator publishes admit cards for Class 10 pre-boards. The Admit Card Issued alert fires for every student row. WhatsApp + Email goes out in a controlled batch over twenty minutes (no provider rate-limit trips), each parent getting their child's admit card as a secure 30-day link. The school office takes zero phone calls about 'where is the admit card'.
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The new fee fine. Late-payment fine added on the 15th of the month. The Student Fine Added alert fires with the title, category and outstanding balance. SMS is off because the school doesn't want to pay for a daily fine reminder, but WhatsApp + Email is on. The parent gets the message, settles the dues by EOD, and the fine is auto-recalculated on next payment.
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The shift away from group chats. A school in Bangalore had 14 WhatsApp parent groups per class, run by 6 class teachers' personal phones. Three of those phones broke; two teachers left in April. Inkwelly's automatic alerts replaced all 14 groups in two weeks — every parent now gets the school's official WhatsApp Business number sending only what's relevant to their child. Class teachers got their personal WhatsApps back.
What office staff do on this screen every week
- Toggle an alert on or off with one click — pause the homework alert during exam week, for instance
- Switch SMS off across the board when the school is running low on DLT credits
- Turn Email on for marksheets so parents have a printable copy for their child's tuition centre
- Add a school override for one specific event without touching the rest
- Filter the screen by On / Off / Needs attention to find alerts that are silently failing
- Search by module — show only the Student Fee alerts during fee-collection week
- Check the right-hand status pill to see which alerts have a template still pending Meta approval
- Click into a single alert to see the template body for every channel and language
- Open the message ledger from any alert row to see the last 50 sends for that event
- Set a default audience (parents vs student) per event without writing a single line of config
See your school's alerts screen
A 20-minute walkthrough on a real Indian school dataset. We turn on three alerts, fire a real test event, and show you the parent's WhatsApp — end to end.
Limits, safety and the small print
The events Inkwelly ships are the ones we actually have a producer for in the product code today — about ten as of the current release. We do not let schools invent new event types in the UI, because every new event needs a tested template, a recipient resolver, a producer that actually fires it, and an audit trail. Schools sometimes ask for a 'custom alert' (e.g. 'send a WhatsApp to all class 8 parents every time a teacher uploads any document'); the right tool for that is the broadcast composer in the messages section, not the automatic alerts screen. Bespoke automation lives there; standardised automation lives here.
Quiet hours are a school-level setting, not a per-alert setting. If a school turns quiet hours off entirely, alerts can fire any hour of the day or night — we strongly recommend keeping the default 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. window for non-OTP traffic. We will not let a fee reminder fire at 3 a.m. by accident, but we will not lock the setting either. The school carries the consequence of its own choice.
Finally, an alert is not a substitute for a phone call when the parent needs to act. If a student is consistently absent without a leave note, the system will fire a daily absentee alert — but the class teacher still needs to call the parent at some point. Automatic alerts buy the office staff the time to make those higher-value calls; they do not replace them. Schools that treat the alerts screen as a complete parent-communication strategy will quietly lose touch with the parents who matter most. The right framing is: routine messages are automated so that human attention can go to the non-routine ones.
Belongs to
1 moduleWhat’s new
1 updateFrequently asked
8 questionsHow many events can Inkwelly fire automatically today?
Around ten parent-facing events are shipped out of the box today — fee payment received, payment link shared, payment link reminder, invoice details sent, fee receipt shared, fine added, attendance marked absent, marksheet published, admit card issued and homework assigned. New events appear on the screen automatically as Inkwelly's product modules ship them; the school doesn't have to do anything to receive a new alert beyond picking its channels.
Can I create my own custom alert from the dashboard?
No — the automatic alerts screen is for events Inkwelly has a tested producer for. Custom one-off messaging is done from the Broadcast Composer (in the Messages section), which lets the school pick an audience, write a free-form message or pick a template, and send. Anything you would call a 'custom alert' is better handled there — you keep the routine alerts standardised and the bespoke messaging flexible.
What happens if a channel template is not approved by Meta yet?
The corresponding channel checkbox is disabled on that alert's row, with a hover note explaining why — most often 'WhatsApp template pending Meta approval'. The school can still tick the other channels (SMS / Email / Push). Once Meta approves the template, the WhatsApp checkbox lights up automatically and the school can enable it with one click.
Do automatic alerts respect parent consent (DPDP Act)?
Yes. Every alert is rendered through Inkwelly's consent layer before it goes out. Utility alerts (fee receipts, attendance, results, admit cards) are treated as service messages and continue while the parent is a school customer. Promotional alerts (school newsletters, fundraisers) require explicit opt-in and are paused the moment a parent withdraws consent. The school cannot bypass this from the alerts screen.
Do alerts work during quiet hours?
Non-OTP alerts respect the school's quiet-hours window (default 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. IST). A school can choose to either drop the message entirely or defer it to the next out-of-window slot — the default behaviour is defer. Login OTPs and authentication codes bypass quiet hours, because parents shouldn't be locked out at night.
Can I see exactly when an alert last fired and to whom?
Yes. Each alert row links to the message ledger filtered by that event — the school can see every send with the recipient name, channel, status (sent, delivered, opened, failed), template body, cost and exact timestamp. Useful both for verifying that an alert actually went out and for spot-checking the message body when a parent calls saying 'I didn't get the receipt'.
Do these alerts work for ICSE, ISC, state board and IB schools?
Yes — the automatic alerts engine has no dependency on the board. CBSE, ICSE, ISC, IB, IGCSE, NIOS and all major state boards (UP Board, Maharashtra Board, Tamil Nadu Matric, Karnataka PUC, Rajasthan Board, MP Mandal, WB Board, Kerala SCERT) use the same Communications module. The event names and the template content are universal.
What if I want SMS off for everything to save cost?
You can untick the SMS column in bulk across every alert row in under two minutes. Many of our schools in Tier-2 cities run with SMS off entirely and rely on WhatsApp + Push for parent communication — that's a perfectly valid setup. Reverse the decision any time without losing any history; toggling a channel off does not delete the template, it just stops dispatch for that channel on that alert.
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