What breaks when a madrasa's records live only on paper

The register is not the problem.

A bound attendance register, filled in with a pen every morning, is a better record than a lot of software. It is legible, it needs no battery, and it survives a power cut. Madrasas have kept records this way for centuries and the method works.

What fails is everything downstream of it.

A mohtamim who wants to know which students in Nazira Awwal were absent more than five days last month has one way to find out: open the register and count. That is an afternoon's work. The answer is correct on the day it is produced and out of date the following week, so it gets produced once a year for the annual report, and for the rest of the year nobody knows.

That is the real cost, and it is not the paper. It is that the information sits in a form nobody can ask a question of.

The four registers every madrasa keeps

From a twelve-student maktab to a jamia with six hundred, the set is almost always the same four.

Attendance. One page per class per month — days across the top, names down the side.

Fees. A ledger of who owes what, and a receipt book with carbon copies.

Progress. For Hifz, which para each student is on and the date the last one was finished. For Nazira, which sipara.

Enrolment. The admission register: name, father's name, date of admission, village, guardian's phone number.

These are four different kinds of record with four different weaknesses, which is why "we will computerise everything" is rarely how it actually goes. One of them hurts more than the others in any given madrasa, and that is the one worth moving first.

What actually breaks

Attendance breaks at the summary, not at the marking. Marking is fast: an ustaz can do a class of thirty in well under a minute. Adding it up is not fast. A monthly percentage per student across eight classes is a few hours of arithmetic that nobody in the building has spare, so it does not get done — and a student who is quietly absent two days a week goes unnoticed for a whole term.

The fee ledger breaks when two people write in it. The receipt book is with whoever takes the money at the gate; the ledger is in the office. Between the two there is a gap of hours or days, and that gap is where a paid fee turns into an unpaid one. Any madrasa that has ever sent a reminder to a parent who had already paid knows the gap I mean.

The progress record breaks when the ustaz changes. A hifz teacher carries a great deal in his head and a certain amount in a personal notebook, and both leave with him. The student's own record — para eleven, finished on the fourth, twenty-two days on para ten — was never written down anywhere that outlasts the teacher who was keeping it.

The admission register breaks at the phone number. It is written once, on the day of admission, and never touched again. Five years later a good share of the numbers do not connect, which is discovered at the worst possible moment: the afternoon a child needs to be sent home.

Hifz 2Attendance RegisterAugust 2026

Student nameRollDate151718192021Hafiz Abdullah01PPPPPPMuhammad Bilal02APPPPPHafiz Abu Bakr03PPPAPPUmar Farooq04PPPPPPMuhammad Hanzala05PPPAPPZakariya Ahmed06APPPPHafiz Talha07PPPPPYusuf Siddique08PPAPP

A holiday — or nobody opened it?

One column a day, whoever opened the book. A timing nobody marked leaves no mark.

Hifz 2

August 2026

FajrAsrMaghrib

1. 15Sat24/24
2. 16SunWeekly off—
3. 17Mon21/24
4. 18Tue24/24
5. 19Wed24/24
6. 20Thu16/24
7. 21FriToday16/16

Marked by an ustaz

125of136

Filled in by the system

11

Nobody marked these. Sijil counts them as missing, not as attendance.

Every day, every timing — including the ones nobody marked.

What is a madrasa management system?

A madrasa management system is software that keeps the same registers a madrasa already keeps — students, classes, attendance, fees, progress — in one place, so that each fact is written once and can be looked at from more than one direction.

The important word is system, not software. A spreadsheet of student names is software. A system means the attendance record knows which class it belongs to, the class knows which teacher takes it, the fee voucher knows which student it is for, and a change to the student's guardian phone number is a change everywhere that number appears. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason a madrasa gets a monthly attendance percentage for nothing instead of for an afternoon.

It is not an accounting package and it is not a school ERP. A madrasa's year is shaped by Ramadan and by shift timings; its central academic record is para and sipara progress, not marks out of a hundred. Software built for an English-medium school will have a marks sheet and no place to record that a student finished para eleven on the fourth.

Seven questions worth asking before you move a register onto a screen

These apply to any system, ours included. They are in the order that matters.

1. Is it in Urdu, or is Urdu something added afterwards? Ask to see the screen an ustaz uses every day, in Urdu, on a phone. Check whether the layout reverses properly — right to left, buttons on the correct side — or whether the Urdu is English screens with the words swapped. A teacher who has to read the interface twice to be sure will stop using it by the second week.

2. Does it work without internet? Not "does it warn you", but: can an ustaz mark attendance on the ground floor where there is no signal, walk upstairs, and have the marks arrive on their own? If the answer is that he should try again later, attendance will be taken on paper and typed in on Thursday, which is the same register with an extra step.

3. Who can see what? A teacher should be able to mark his own class and not read the fee ledger. A parent should see one child. Ask what the parent sees, exactly, and ask who can delete a record.

4. What happens when the phone breaks, or the ustaz leaves? The record must belong to the madrasa, not to a device or to a person. Ask how a new teacher is given a class and how an old one is removed from it.

5. Where is our data, and who else can read it? A madrasa's register contains children's names, guardians' phone numbers and often photographs. Ask where it is stored, whether one madrasa's records can be reached from another's account, and what is logged when someone opens a student's file.

6. Can we get our records out again? This is the question people ask last and regret asking last. Ask specifically: can you leave with your data, in what form, and does someone have to do it for you?

7. What does it cost next year? Ask for the price in writing, ask what happens when the student count grows past the plan, and ask what the price was twelve months ago.

How Sijil answers those seven

This is the specific half. Every claim below is something the software does today, not something planned.

Urdu is not a translation layer. Every screen ships in English and Urdu, and the Urdu is right to left — the layout reverses, not just the words. Fee amounts and dates stay in Latin figures in both, because that is how a challan is actually written in Pakistan.

One record, two languages

English

Muhammad Hanzala

Hifz 2

Rs. 1,500

اردو

محمد حنظلہ

درجہ حفظ ۲

Rs. 1,500

• The row turns around
• Set in Naskh, not in a Latin face
• The amount does not move at all

Latin digits, left to right, in both — the way every fee challan in Pakistan is already written.

Attendance works with no signal. An ustaz marks Present, Absent or Leave with a reason on his own phone. If there is no connection the entries queue on the device and go up by themselves the next time he has a signal with the app open — and because the queue is stored on the phone rather than in memory, it survives the app being closed and the phone being restarted. This is the feature the whole app was built around, because a madrasa's thickest walls are usually between the classroom and the tower.

On this phoneNo signal

1. Fajr attendance

   5:24

   Hifz 2 — 8 marks

2. Tajweed progress

   5:29

   Muhammad Hanzala — Sabaq 7 complete

3. Leave noted, with reason

   5:31

   Umar Farooq

4. App closed5:36

5. Phone restarted6:10

3 waiting to upload

He opens the app again

7:41

3 uploaded, in one go·Nothing re-entered

There are three separate portals. Admin for the mohtamim, Teacher for the ustaz, and a parent portal. A teacher marks his own classes; a parent signs in with a phone number and a PIN of their own, and sees their own children.

The record is attached to the student. Para start and completion dates, and the days taken on each para, sit on the student's file. Reassigning a class does not move the history.

Each madrasa has its own subdomain, such as jamia.sijil.pk, and one institution's data is not reachable from another's account.

A teacher's account is tied to the phone he set up. The first phone works straight away. If the same account is then opened on a second phone, that phone waits in the mohtamim's list until he allows it, and until then it opens nothing. Every phone that is signed in is listed with its browser, the city it was in and when it was last used, and any one of them can be signed out from there.

The price is on the pricing section of the home page, with the student, teacher and class limits printed next to it. It is not settled yet — we are still setting it — so ask us in writing, which is question seven applied to us.

What Sijil does not do yet

There is no export button. You cannot, today, click something and get a spreadsheet of your students. The one thing that leaves the app on your own click is a printed fee receipt. Ask us in writing and a copy of your own records is sent to you, because they are yours; there is no screen that does it for you yet.

I would rather write that down here than let you find it in month three. It is also the honest answer to question six, and if you are asking a different vendor the same question, the answer you want is this specific — not "of course, full data portability".

Where to start

Move the register that is costing you an afternoon a month, and move only that one. Attendance, for most madrasas. Keep the paper register running alongside for a term; if the two disagree, you have learned something about the software, and if they agree for a full term you can stop writing one of them.

The registers that are not hurting can wait. A madrasa that computerises all four at once in the same month usually ends up keeping all four on paper as well.