What Sijil does
The registers Sijil keeps for you, and the madrasa work it deliberately leaves alone.
Sijil keeps a madrasa's registers. Not its curriculum, not its examinations, not its correspondence — its registers: who is enrolled, who was present, how far each student has reached, and what has been paid. Those four things are what a madrasa office spends its day on, and they are what a paper register does badly the moment there is more than one of it.
This page is the honest inventory: what Sijil records, and what it deliberately leaves to you.
What it is for
Three problems, in the order madrasas run into them.
The register goes missing, or disagrees with itself. Attendance marked in a notebook is fine until somebody asks how often one boy has been absent since Ramadan. Sijil keeps every mark against a date and a timing, so that question is a screen rather than an afternoon.
Fees are a ledger, and a ledger has to add up. Who owes what, since when, what was waived and what was collected in cash on a day nobody wrote down. Every payment in Sijil produces a numbered receipt, and the arrears figure is derived from the same rows the receipt came from.
Parents ask. Not unreasonably, and usually at the gate. A parent with the portal can see their own child's attendance and dues without anybody opening a register for them.
The three portals
One madrasa, three ways in, and each one sees only what its work requires.
- The Mohtamim manages everything: students, classes, asatiza, fees, the calendar, the settings. Signs in with Google.
- An Ustaz marks the register for their own classes and records sabaq progress, usually from a phone. Signs in with the Madrasa Code, their phone number and a Login PIN.
- A parent reads their own children's attendance, progress and dues. Signs in with a phone number and a PIN they set from an invite code.
The split is enforced on the server, not merely in what each screen chooses to show. Accounts and roles is the longer version.
Every register it keeps
Student records
Student registration and records — guardian details, roll numbers, admission dates, active and inactive status
- A profile page per student: attendance, progress, fees and personal details on separate tabs, with every figure computed in the database rather than in the browser.
- Photographs upload from the phone, are cropped to a square around the face, and are capped at 2 MB per image.
- Moving a student to another class keeps the history: each spell in a class is stored with its own dates, so last term's attendance stays attached to the class it was marked in.
- Guardian relation is recorded in Urdu as it would be written by hand — والد, والدہ, بھائی and so on — and CNIC numbers are formatted as you type.
- Search finds a student by name or roll number from anywhere in the admin portal.
Classes and timings
Classes, sections and shift timings — Hifz, Nazira and Dars-e-Nizami across morning, evening and night shifts
- A class can have several timings, each on its own days of the week, so one class taught after Fajr and again after Asr is two timings rather than two classes.
- Classes are marked as boys' or girls' classes, and a girls' madrasa runs on the same system with the same asatiza scoping.
- Your own categories, levels and tracks — Qaidah, Nazira, Hifz, Dars-e-Nizami, or whatever your madrasa calls them — with a display order you set by dragging.
- Asatiza are assigned per class, and a teacher sees only the classes assigned to them.
Attendance
1-tap mobile attendance — Present, Absent and Leave with reasons, full history and monthly percentages
- Attendance is marked against a class timing on a date, so a class that meets twice a day is two registers and not one ambiguous row.
- A day the madrasa was closed is not an absence: holidays and your weekend pattern are excluded before any percentage is calculated.
- Missed days are visible as missed rather than silently blank, and an Ustaz can go back and fill a previous day.
- Per student: a month calendar, a full history, and a percentage. Per class: a report for any period. Per madrasa: today at a glance for the Mohtamim.
- Leave is recorded with its reason, so an absence with a reason and an unexplained absence do not read the same in the register.
Hifz and Nazira progress
Hifz and Nazira progress tracking — Juz start and completion dates, days taken per Juz, weekly and monthly milestones
- Progress is a position on an ordered list of units, not a percentage typed in by hand — so "which Juz is he on, and since when" always has one answer.
- The unit list is yours to define: thirty Juz for Hifz, the surahs for Nazira, the letters and joining for Qaidah or تختی, the kitabs for Dars-e-Nizami.
- Advancing a student records the date, which is what produces days-taken per unit without anyone counting.
- A wrong entry is undone rather than overwritten — one action, and the previous position comes back with its dates intact.
- A student can be on more than one track at once, so Hifz in the morning and Dars-e-Nizami in the evening are two positions on one profile.
Fees and collection
Fee tracking and financial analytics — vouchers, paid versus pending per student, monthly and 6-month collection trends
- The monthly fee is set per class, so a Hifz class and a Dars-e-Nizami class can carry different amounts without a rule per student.
- Each month's fees are raised automatically for every enrolled student, so nobody is billed for a month they were not there.
- Part payments are supported: pay 800 against a 1,500 fee and the row shows 700 still outstanding rather than staying "unpaid".
- A concession or waiver is recorded on the fee row itself, so the register shows what was actually owed after the waiver — not a full amount with a note beside it.
- Every payment produces a dated, numbered receipt — RCP-20260828-0007 — recorded as cash, bank or online, and printable from the phone.
- A defaulters list shows who is behind and by how much, and the fee register shows one student's whole payment history in one place.
Calendar, holidays and weekends
Madrasa calendar — your own weekend pattern, holidays and events, all of which attendance and fee reports already know about
- You set which days of the week the madrasa is closed — Friday, Sunday, both, or nothing — instead of accepting somebody else's idea of a weekend.
- Holidays are entered as date ranges with a reason, and the calendar refuses two entries that overlap rather than storing both.
- Events — imtihan days, jalsa, a visiting muhaddith — sit on the same calendar the asatiza and the parents see.
- Because attendance reads this calendar, a closed day never counts against a student and never needs correcting afterwards.
Academic year rollover
Closing one academic year and opening the next — last year's register is archived and stays readable, it is not deleted to make room
- Ending a year is a single deliberate action with a written summary of what it will do, not a settings toggle you can hit by accident.
- The archived year keeps its attendance, its fees and its progress positions, so a certificate or a query about a student who left three years ago is still answerable.
- The rollover is recorded step by step, so if one step fails you can see which one and run it again instead of starting over.
Three role portals
Three role portals — Admin for the Mohtamim, Teacher for the Ustaz, and a Parent portal
- The Mohtamim signs in with a Google account and sees the whole madrasa: today's attendance, the money, every class and every student.
- An Ustaz signs in with a 6-digit PIN — no email, no password to forget — and sees their own classes and nothing else.
- A parent gets an invite code from the madrasa, sets a PIN, and sees their own children — attendance, progress and what fee is due.
- One guardian with four children in the madrasa gets all four on one login, not four separate accounts.
- What each role may see is decided on the server, not hidden in the interface, so a teacher cannot reach another class by editing a URL.
Public page and admissions
A public page for the madrasa, in Urdu and English, with an admission-inquiry form that lands in the admin portal
- The madrasa writes its own introduction in both languages — courses offered, timings, contact — and publishes it when it is ready, not before.
- A parent who finds the page can send an admission inquiry with their name, number and what they are asking about, without creating an account.
- Inquiries collect in one list in the admin portal, so nothing depends on somebody remembering a WhatsApp message.
- The form is rate-limited and length-capped, because an open form on a public page is otherwise an invitation to spam.
Marking without a signal
Offline attendance and progress — an Ustaz marks attendance and records Hifz or Nazira progress with no connection; entries queue on the device, survive the app closing and the phone restarting, and upload themselves the next time the app is open with a signal
- This covers attendance and Hifz or Nazira progress — the two things an Ustaz does standing in front of the class. Sijil is not an offline-first product and the rest of it needs a connection.
- The class roster is already on the phone before the signal drops, so the register opens and fills with no network at all.
- Queued entries are held on the device itself, so closing the app or restarting the phone does not lose them.
- Upload happens while the app is open with a signal. It is not a background service, so the app has to be opened once for the queue to clear — said plainly here because a promise of silent background sync would be false.
- Sijil installs to the phone's home screen from the browser, so no app store and no APK to pass around.
Who can get in
Access control built for a madrasa — the Mohtamim signs in with Google, asatiza use PINs, and a teacher's phone has to be approved before it can mark attendance
- Admin sign-in is Google-only. There is no admin password to be shared, written on a register or guessed.
- Three separate PINs for three separate jobs: a 6-digit login PIN for an Ustaz, a 4-digit PIN to clear a class register, and a master PIN the Mohtamim keeps.
- Obvious PINs — 1234, 0000, a run of the same digit — are refused when they are set, not merely discouraged.
- A teacher's device is bound to their account and the Mohtamim approves it. A phone that was lost or a teacher who has left is cut off from the admin portal.
- Everything travels over HTTPS. To be exact rather than reassuring: that is encryption in transit, and it is what we claim — nothing here says data is encrypted at rest.
Your own subdomain
A separate subdomain per madrasa, such as jamia.sijil.pk, with data isolated per institution
- You pick the name at registration and that becomes the address your asatiza and parents use — an address that belongs to your madrasa, not a numbered account inside somebody else's.
- One madrasa cannot read another's records. Separation is enforced in the database, not by filtering in the app.
- The madrasa's own name and logo appear in its portal, so the asatiza see their madrasa rather than our brand.
- A full copy of your records is taken every night and the last seven nights are kept.
- Tenant portals are kept out of search engines on purpose. Your students' names are not something Google should be able to find.
Urdu and English
Every screen is in both Urdu and English, and the Urdu is right-to-left throughout — not English with a translation bolted on
- The whole interface switches language, including numbers, dates and the direction the page reads in.
- Names, guardian relations and remarks are stored in Urdu script, so a register reads the way it was written.
- The vocabulary is the madrasa's own — Mohtamim, Ustaz, sabaq, Juz, Nazira, hazri — rather than school software words translated into Urdu.
- An Ustaz who does not read English can run their whole register in Urdu, which is the point of it being bilingual rather than translated.
What it leaves alone
Sijil is deliberately not a whole madrasa in software. It does not:
- keep exam marks or grades. Progress in Sijil is a position on an ordered list of units — which para, which sabaq — and not a score.
- send messages for you. There is no SMS or automated WhatsApp. Where a message helps, Sijil opens WhatsApp with the text ready and you press send.
- replace your website. Each madrasa gets one public page it can fill in and switch on, no more.
- do accounts. Fees are a fee ledger, not a chart of accounts: no salaries, no expenses, no donations.
- work as a board or wifaq record. Nothing here is affiliated with, or reported to, any board.
If one of those is what you needed, better to know now than after entering four hundred students.
What happens to your records
They stay yours. A full copy of the database is taken every night and the last seven nights are kept. Everything between your phone and Sijil travels over HTTPS. One madrasa cannot read another's records, and that separation is enforced in the database rather than by the app remembering to filter — and madrasa portals are kept out of search engines on purpose, because your students' names are not something Google should be able to find.