Promote a whole school in one afternoon. Per-student class, roll, registration. Skip-on-error for messy data.

Why April promotion week breaks every school office

The last week of March, every Indian school office turns into a paperwork war zone. Class 5's annual results are out. The principal has signed the promotion list — 250 students moving from Class 5 to Class 6, 195 from Class 4 to Class 5, 220 from Class 3 to Class 4. Multiply by every grade and the school has 1,200 students who all need to be carried into next year's session — 2026-27 — with new section assignments, fresh roll numbers in their target sections, and clean registration numbers for the upcoming CBSE board exam batch.

In most school ERPs this becomes 1,200 separate operations. Open the student profile in 2025-26. Note the current class. Switch to 2026-27. Re-enter the student. Pick their new class. Pick their new roll number. Hope you got the section right (was she in Class 5 A or Class 5 B?). Hope you didn't accidentally promote a student who was actually held back. Hope the fee ledger for the new year is created. Hope the parent app reflects the correct class. The work takes a single office assistant 12 working days at a school of 1,200 students. The principal is still chasing pending entries on April 25th when the new session has already started. Three weeks lost.

We built Promotion as a dedicated screen that carries the entire school across the year boundary in a single afternoon. Pick the target session. The screen shows every active student in the current session. Filter to a class, tick the rows, set their target class and new roll numbers in an inline table, save. Inkwelly creates the next-session academic record for each student, opens their fee ledger for the new year, transfers their attendance baseline, and writes a per-student promotion entry to the audit log — all in one bulk save. A 1,200-student school can finish promotion in an afternoon, not a fortnight.

How Promotion works — one screen, two sessions, one save

Open Students → Promotion in the session sidebar. The page loads with up to 100 active students from the current session, sorted alphabetically. The header shows the cohort breakdown — total students, boys, girls — so the office assistant immediately knows the scope she's working with.

Step 1 — Pick the target session. A card at the top of the page asks for the target academic session — typically the next year, 2026-27 if you're currently in 2025-26. The dropdown lists every active session for your school, with the current one disabled (you can't promote to the same year). When you pick a target, Inkwelly lazy-loads that year's class list — Class 1 A, Class 1 B, all the way up to Class 12 Commerce for the new year, exactly as your school configured it. A small green pill confirms 'Classes available for 2026-27' once the load completes.

Step 2 — Filter to the cohort. Three filters across the top: free-text search by name, current-session class dropdown, gender. The grid only shows active students by default — students already marked inactive (transferred out, withdrawn) don't accidentally get promoted. Filter to Class 5 A to promote that section to Class 6; filter to all girls in Class 8 to promote them as a cohort; or leave the filter open to act on the entire active student body.

Step 3 — Tick the students and configure per-student. Tick the row checkboxes for the students promoting. The selection bar shows the count, the target session, and a 'Promote' button. Clicking 'Promote' opens the configuration dialog. For bulk selections, Inkwelly shows a sticky-header table — one row per selected student — with three editable columns: target class (dropdown of next-session classes), new roll number, new registration number. Use the Quick apply dropdown at the top of the table to set the same target class for every selected student in one click — typical when promoting an entire Class 5 A to Class 6 A.

Step 4 — Set effective date, remarks, save. A shared effective date applies to every student in this batch — typically April 1st of the new session. Optional shared remarks for context. For bulk runs, a skipErrors checkbox lets you choose: continue past failed rows (keeping the successes) or stop at the first failure. Save. Inkwelly creates the new-session academic record per student, links them to the target class, assigns roll and registration numbers, opens their fee ledger for the new year, and writes a per-student promotion entry to the audit log. The dialog closes with a count of successful and failed promotions — successful: 38, failed: 0 for a clean run.

Walkthrough — four screens, end to end

“April mein 1,150 students ka promotion ek session se doosre mein le jaane mein pehle 11 din lagte the. Ab Promotion screen pe class-wise filter karke, Quick apply se target class set karke, roll numbers paste karke — saara school ek doopahar mein ho gaya. Skip-errors ne 7 missing-DOB students ko side mein rakha, baaki 1,143 saaf chal gaye. Naya session 1 April ko ready tha.”

A typical April promotion week with Inkwelly

March 28th — Pre-flight check. The principal's signed promotion list arrives in the office. Office assistant logs into Inkwelly, opens the academic year setup, and confirms 2026-27 has its class list ready — Class 1 A through Class 12 Commerce, with the right intake counts, the right teacher-in-charge per section. If anything is missing, she sets it up first — a 30-minute task per session, one-time per year.

March 30th — Class 1 to Class 5 promotions. The bulk of the school. She filters Promotion screen to Class 1, ticks all 90 students with the master checkbox, picks 2026-27 as the target session, opens the dialog, uses Quick apply to set Class 2 A for the first 45 (which the principal has assigned to that section), saves with skipErrors on. Result: successful: 44, failed: 1. The one failure is a student whose profile has a missing date of birth — she fixes it in the profile screen, re-runs Promotion for just that student, success. Repeats for Class 1 → Class 2 B, then for every grade through Class 5. By 4 PM, primary-school promotion is done.

March 31st — Class 6 to Class 12 promotions, plus held-back exclusions. Middle school and senior school. The principal's list flagged 14 students who failed to meet the promotion criteria — they stay in the same grade. Office assistant works class-by-class, ticking only the students on the principal's promotion list (skipping the held-back ones), and runs each section's promotion. The Class 9 → Class 10 batch needs special handling — every student gets a fresh CBSE registration number that the office prepared in a spreadsheet last week. She pastes the registration numbers into the inline column. Result: successful: 78, failed: 0. By 6 PM, the entire school is on 2026-27.

April 1st — New session opens cleanly. Class teachers log in to find their new sections fully populated. Fee invoices for 2026-27 are auto-generated based on the new fee structure. Parents see their child's new section in the parent app from day one. The morning assembly reads out the new roll lists from a printed PDF the office generated from the class roster screen. The principal's secretary doesn't have a single 'pending promotion' email to chase down. The new academic year has already started, on time.

See Promotion live on your school's data

Bring last year's promotion list. We'll set up your school's two sessions during the demo, run the promotion of an entire grade live, and show you how 12 days of work becomes one afternoon.

Limits, safety, and the small print

Cross-session by design. Promotion is the only screen for moving students from one academic session to another. For within-session moves between sections — Class 6 A to Class 6 B in the same year — use the dedicated Class Change screen. Trying to use Class Change for year-end migration loses the fee-ledger creation, attendance baseline transfer and audit-log linkage that Promotion handles automatically.

100 students per page. The grid loads up to 100 active students at once — enough for an entire class section, or a filtered cohort. Schools with 1,000+ students promote class-by-class — filter to Class 1, run the promotion batch, filter to Class 2, run the next batch, and so on. Each batch is its own atomic save with its own per-row outcomes. The whole school is typically done in 90 minutes of focused work.

Active-only by default. Inactive students (transferred out, withdrawn, suspended, deceased) are excluded from the grid. This is intentional safety — the office assistant cannot accidentally promote a student who has already left. To promote a previously-inactive student (rare — e.g., a transfer back from a sister school), reactivate them in the student profile first, then run Promotion.

Per-row atomicity with skip-on-error. Each student is processed as its own transaction. With skipErrors on, the bulk save commits every successful row and reports the failures separately — no all-or-nothing rollback. With skipErrors off (strict mode), the bulk save halts at the first failure. Default is off for safety; turn it on for messy bulk runs where partial-success is acceptable.

Effective date drives reports. Reports across years honour the effective date. A Class 5 A attendance summary for March will show the student as 5 A; the April summary in the new session will show her as 6 A, automatically — no manual report regeneration. Back-dated promotions (recording a March 28th decision on April 5th) and forward-dated promotions (running the batch in late February for April 1st) both work the same way.

Audit log per student. Every promotion writes a per-student audit entry — actor, timestamp, IP address, source session, source class, target session, target class, new roll number, new registration number, effective date, remarks, source ('Promotion'). The audit log is exportable from the school admin panel and stands up to CBSE renewal, ICSE inspection and state-board RTE compliance.

Role-based access. Promotion is gated to school admin and principal roles by default. Class teachers see individual student profile edits in their assigned section but not the bulk promotion screen. Most schools keep it admin-only because the impact of a bad promotion run touches the fee ledger, attendance register and exam roster across two years. Configure permissions per role from the school IAM settings.

Multi-tenant isolation. Like every Inkwelly module, your school's Promotion operates strictly on your school's records. Multi-school trusts run Promotion per-school independently with no cross-school access. A single trust admin can run all 6 schools' promotions in succession from the same login.

Class list must exist in the target session. Promotion validates that the target session has a configured class list before allowing saves. If 2026-27 has no classes set up yet, the page surfaces a yellow warning with a link to the academic year setup screen — set up the class list once per year, then run promotions against it.