Terms and Conditions

1. Who this agreement is between

On one side is Hassan, an individual based in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan, trading as Sijil — “we”, “us”, “Sijil”. On the other is your madrasa, the institution whose records are kept in the account — “you”. An account is opened by a person acting for the madrasa, and by opening it that person confirms they are permitted to bind the madrasa to this agreement. If you are not, do not open the account; ask whoever is.

Teachers, guardians and students use Sijil through your madrasa rather than through an agreement with us. They are not parties to this document, they have no account with us, and every question about their records is a question for the madrasa. What we owe them is set out in the privacy policy; what you owe them is a matter between you and them.

Six documents govern the relationship, and they are meant to be read as one: these terms, the privacy policy, the cookie policy, the data processing agreement, the acceptable use policy and the billing and refund policy. Where the data processing agreement says something different from these terms about the handling of personal data, the data processing agreement wins, because it is the more specific document and the one your madrasa signed for that purpose.

2. What we provide

Sijil is software for running a madrasa’s daily records: students and their classes, teachers, attendance taken shift by shift, fees charged and collected, and each student’s progress through what they are memorising. Guardians can see their own child through a separate parent view, and a madrasa can publish a simple public page with its own details. The teacher’s side works without a connection and sends what was recorded once there is one again.

It is worth being clear about what is not in it, because a madrasa choosing software should not have to discover an absence after enrolling four hundred students:

• There is no card payment in the product. No card number, expiry or CVV is ever typed into Sijil, because there is nowhere to type one.
• There is no self-service export or delete button. When you ask for a copy of your data or its deletion, a person does it by hand.
• We do not sell data, share it with advertisers or data brokers, or use it to target advertising. There is no advertising anywhere in Sijil.
• We do not use your madrasa’s records to train machine-learning models.
• We do not read your madrasa’s records except when you ask us to help with a specific problem, or where we must to keep the service running or to meet a legal obligation.

Sijil is new. We add to it, change how parts of it work, and occasionally remove something that was not earning its place. We will not remove a feature your madrasa depends on without telling you first and, where it matters, giving you a way to keep the records that feature produced. What we will not do is quietly move a feature you are paying for behind a higher price.

3. Your account

One account belongs to one madrasa, and it is approved by us before it opens rather than created on sign-up. We ask for the madrasa’s details and the name of the person responsible, and we may decline or delay an application — most often because we cannot tell that the madrasa is real, which is a check made for the sake of the children whose records would otherwise be sitting in an account belonging to nobody.

Account holders must be adults. Students never hold accounts and never sign in — their records exist because the madrasa records them, which is why nothing in Sijil asks a child to agree to anything. Administrators sign in with Google, so their password is Google’s business and not ours. Teachers and guardians are given short PINs by the madrasa, tied to the device they are given on, and a PIN is only as private as the person who wrote it on the back of a register.

You are responsible for what is done from your madrasa’s account: keeping the list of administrators current, removing a teacher who has left, changing a PIN that has been shared around, and telling us promptly if you think someone is signing in who should not be. We give an administrator the tools to see the devices and sign-ins on the account, and we act on what you tell us, but we cannot tell from here which of your staff should still have a key.

What you enter should be accurate, and it should be yours to enter. Putting a child’s record into Sijil is a statement that the madrasa is entitled to hold it — including the photograph, which is dealt with separately in the data processing agreement because a child’s face deserves its own clause rather than a line in a list.

4. Money, plans and limits

A madrasa starts with 30 days free. After that the plan is PKR 1,000 a month per madrasa, invoiced by us and paid by whichever arrangement suits you — bank transfer, EasyPaisa, JazzCash or cash. There is no card payment in the product and no card details are held anywhere. If you pay and then decide within 14 days that Sijil is not for you, tell us and we will refund the payment.

A plan includes the following, and these are contractual ceilings rather than something the software enforces on its own. If your madrasa grows past one of them, nothing breaks and nothing is switched off: we talk to you, agree an upgrade, and raise the limit. Until that is agreed we may decline to add further students, teachers or classes.

Prices will change eventually, and when they do we will tell you at least a month before your next invoice, so you can decide before you are billed rather than after. A price rise never applies to an invoice already issued. Everything else about invoicing, reminders, what happens when payment does not arrive, and how a refund is actually made is in the billing and refund policy.

5. Availability and support

We do not offer an uptime guarantee, and we would rather say that than print a figure nobody measures. Sijil runs on the same infrastructure the rest of the internet does and is usually available; sometimes it will not be, because of a fault of ours, a fault of a supplier, or because we are deploying a change. Where we can choose the timing we choose the hours a madrasa is least likely to be taking attendance.

The teacher’s side is built to keep working when the connection does not, which is the practical answer to a shaky internet: attendance taken during an outage is held on the device and sent when the connection returns. That is a feature and not a promise about your equipment — a phone that is wiped or lost before it reconnects takes whatever was on it.

Support is a person, reachable at contact@sijil.pk or on +92 371 2633733, in Urdu or English. We answer during working hours in Pakistan and usually the same day. There is no ticket number and no queue position, which is the advantage of being small; the disadvantage is that we are sometimes slower than a company with a support department, and we will say so rather than leave you guessing.

When we help with a specific problem we sometimes need to look at the records the problem is in. We look at what the problem requires and nothing else, and we do not treat a support request as permission to browse.

6. Your records are yours

Everything your madrasa enters — students, teachers, guardians, attendance, fees, lesson progress, photographs, your public page — belongs to your madrasa. We hold it to run the service for you and for no other purpose. We do not sell it, we do not use it to train anything, and we do not treat it as ours because it happens to sit on our infrastructure.

You can ask for a copy at any time and we will give you one — as structured files you can keep and read elsewhere. There is no button for it: a person prepares it by hand, so allow a few days. Asking for a copy is free, and we will not make it a condition of anything.

The rest — the software itself, the design, the name and the mark — stays ours. You are licensed to use it while this agreement is running, and that licence ends when the agreement does. Nothing in this section stops you from taking your records with you.

7. How Sijil must be used

The full list is in the acceptable use policy, and it is short. In summary: use Sijil for your madrasa’s own records; do not put someone else’s records into it; do not attempt to reach another madrasa’s data or test our defences without asking us first; do not use it to harass anyone or to hold material that is unlawful in Pakistan; and do not resell access or share one account between institutions.

A security researcher is welcome, and is asked to write to us first. We have never taken action against anyone who told us about a weakness they found, and we do not intend to start.

8. Suspension, and ending this agreement

You may end this agreement whenever you like, by telling us. There is no notice period and no exit fee. We invoice monthly, so ending it means you are not invoiced again; we do not refund part of a month already begun unless you are inside the money-back window.

We may restrict an account in three situations, and only these three. If an invoice stays unpaid after we have reminded you two or three times over a period of weeks, we may set the account to read-only — everyone can still sign in and read everything, but nothing new can be entered. If the acceptable use policy is being broken, we will tell you what we have seen and give you a chance to put it right, unless the breach is one where waiting would make things worse. And if we are ordered to by a court or by law, we comply, and tell you unless we are forbidden to.

A restriction is not a deletion, and we will not confuse the two. We do not delete a madrasa’s records because it is late on a payment or because we have fallen out. If we end the agreement ourselves for a reason other than a serious breach, you get 30 days’ notice, your data, and a refund of anything you have paid for a period you will not now be using.

9. What we do not promise

This is the part that is usually written in capitals. It is not written in capitals here, and it means exactly what the capitals would mean.

• Sijil is provided as it is. We do not promise it is free of faults, and we do not promise it will suit every way a madrasa works.
• We do not promise it will always be available, or always be fast, or that a particular feature will exist a year from now.
• We do not promise that a record you entered will survive your own deletion of it, or a device being lost before it syncs.
• We do not give advice. Sijil records fees, attendance and progress; it does not tell you what to charge, whom to admit, or what your obligations to a family are.
• Where a supplier we depend on fails — the hosting, the database, the image service, the network — we are affected by it too, and we cannot promise more reliability than they give us.

None of this removes a protection that Pakistani law gives you and does not allow us to contract out of. Where a law says a term like this cannot be enforced, it is not enforced, and the rest of the agreement stands.

10. Limits on what we owe

If we cause your madrasa a loss by breaking this agreement or by our own negligence, what we owe is limited to the total amount your madrasa has paid us in the twelve months before the loss. At the current price that is a small sum, and it would be dishonest to let a clause imply otherwise.

Two things sit outside that cap in both directions. We do not limit our liability for our own fraud or dishonesty, or for anything Pakistani law does not permit us to limit. And the cap does not touch our obligation to give you your records back — that we do regardless of any dispute about money.

On your side: if a claim is made against us because of records your madrasa put into Sijil — a photograph published without the family’s permission, information about someone your madrasa was not entitled to hold, content that was unlawful — that claim is yours to answer, and you will cover what it costs us to deal with it. We will tell you about any such claim promptly and let you take the lead in dealing with it.

11. If we cannot continue

A service run by one person carries a risk a company does not, and pretending otherwise would be the least useful thing this document could do. So: if we decide to stop operating Sijil, or cannot continue for any reason, we will give every madrasa at least 90 days’ notice, hand over a complete copy of its records in that period, and refund anything paid for time that will not now be served. We will not switch the service off and post a notice afterwards.

You can reduce your own exposure to this without waiting for us: ask for an export at the end of each term and keep it. We will provide one every time you ask, and a madrasa that holds its own copy of last term’s register is not dependent on anyone’s continued existence.

12. Changes to these terms, and transfer

We will change these terms from time to time. When a change affects what you get or what you owe, we will email every madrasa administrator at least 30 days before it takes effect, say plainly what is different, and if you do not accept it you may end the agreement before the change applies and take your data with you. Corrections that do not change either side’s position — a clearer sentence, a fixed typo — we simply make, and the pair of dates at the top of the page will show that something moved.

You cannot transfer this agreement to another institution without asking us, because the account is tied to your madrasa and its records. We may transfer it in one situation, which is the one already disclosed at the top of this page: if we incorporate as Sijil Technologies, this agreement moves to that company on the same terms, and we will tell you in writing before it does. A transfer does not change what you pay or what we owe, and it is not an occasion to rewrite the deal.

13. Law, and where a dispute goes

This agreement is governed by the laws of Pakistan, and the courts of Karachi have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it. We have not put an arbitration clause here: arbitration costs more than the annual fee for this product, so a clause requiring it would in practice mean neither of us could afford to enforce anything.

Before either of us goes anywhere near a court, write to contact@sijil.pk and say what the problem is. Almost everything that looks like a dispute is a misunderstanding about a number on a screen, and it is resolved in a phone call. We will answer, and we will not treat a complaint as a threat.

If a court decides that one part of this agreement cannot be enforced, the rest of it continues to apply. If we do not enforce something immediately, that does not mean we have given it up. And these six documents together are the whole of what we have agreed — anything said in a demonstration, a WhatsApp message or a phone call that contradicts them does not override them, though if we told you something wrong we would rather correct the document than argue about it.

14. How to reach us

Anything about this agreement

contact@sijil.pk

By phone, Urdu or English

+92 371 2633733

Security problems

security@sijil.pk

Where we are

Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan