How to customise a parent notification in Inkwelly

1. Open the Templates page

In Inkwelly open Communications → Templates. The list shows every notification template available to the school. Each row tells you whether the school is currently using Inkwelly’s default (the gray Using default tag) or its own customised copy (the teal Customized tag). Click into the template you want to change — Invoice Details + Payment Link, Fee Payment Received, Attendance Marked Absent, anything on the list.

2. Switch to the channel and language you want to change

The template detail page has three channel tabs at the top — WhatsApp, SMS, Email — plus a Push tab for app-only schools. Click the channel you want to customise; each channel has its own body because the same notification reads differently on a 160-character SMS than on a WhatsApp message with rich formatting. Inside that tab, each language (EN, HI, more) is a separate row. Pick the row you want.

3. Click Customise

Click the Customise button on that language row. Inkwelly forks the system default into a school-owned copy and unlocks the editor. The page now shows the previous read-only body next to an editable text area pre-filled with the same words — so the starting point is identical, and any change is purely additive. The template status drops from APPROVED to Customized · Not submitted (for WhatsApp) so you can see at a glance which variants now diverge from default.

4. Edit the body, keeping variables intact

Edit the body. Keep every variable placeholder in place — {{1}}, {{2}} on WhatsApp; {#var#} style on SMS; {{studentName}} style on Email. Inkwelly fills these from real student / fee / attendance data at send time. Reordering variables or renaming them breaks the substitution. You can freely add static text around the variables — the school's name, a sign-off line, an emergency contact — and that is where most schools concentrate the customisation.

5. Preview the parent's view

The right pane of the editor shows a live preview rendered the way the actual parent will see it: WhatsApp's chat-bubble style with bold and italics, SMS's plain 160-character view (Inkwelly counts the segments), Email's full HTML rendered inside a phone-width frame. Sample values for the variables come from the school's own dataset, so the preview looks like a real outgoing notification — catch typos, awkward line breaks and oversize lengths before saving.

6. Save the customisation

Click Save. Inkwelly stores the new body against the school + channel + language combination and stamps a customizedAt timestamp on the row. Customised templates persist across sessions and are visible to the rest of the school admin team. The Customized badge replaces Using default on the Templates list row — anyone walking the dashboard tomorrow will see that this template now belongs to the school.

7. Re-submit for approval where required

For WhatsApp variants, click Submit to Meta on the same screen — customised wording is a new template asset to Meta, and Inkwelly will not dispatch through a customised but unapproved WhatsApp variant. For SMS variants, copy the new body to your DLT operator portal, register it, and paste the new 19-digit template ID back into Inkwelly. Email variants are dispatch-ready immediately because Inkwelly does not require provider-side approval for email.