School Launcher: setting up a new school

School Launcher is the checklist that takes a brand-new school from an empty CloudSchool to a school that is actually running on it. Find it at the top of the sidebar under General → School Launcher.

It is not a wizard. There is no "Next" button you have to sit through, and nothing traps you half way. Leave it and come back tomorrow, on a different computer, and it will be exactly where you left it — because it does not remember your progress, it reads it from your school's real data. Add a class in Classes & Batches and the launcher already knows.

What you see

At the top: your readiness score out of 100, and Next — the single most useful thing to do right now. If you only ever do what "Next" says, you will arrive in the right order.

Below it, three groups:

1. Get running — the bare minimum for a school day: your school's details, classes and batches, staff, students, and your first attendance register.
2. Start billing — fee heads and amounts, a schedule, and the first challan a parent can actually pay. This stays folded away until Get running is finished, because doing fees before you have students is how schools get stuck.
3. The rest of the school — exams, timetable, payroll, certificates, library, transport. Do these in any order, whenever you need them.

Every task tells you why it matters — what stays broken while it is undone — and links straight to the page that does the job.

The four states a task can be in

• Done — your data proves it. Nothing to do.
• Partly done — started, but not everywhere. You will see the count, like "3 of 12 batches have a class teacher".
• To do — nothing yet.
• Using the default — this is the one worth understanding. Some settings work out of the box, so nothing looks wrong. Your challans print. Your report cards grade. But they print with no bank account number on them, and they grade on CloudSchool's grading scale rather than yours. Nothing is broken and nothing warns you — which is exactly why the launcher keeps asking. Either set your own, or press The default is fine and it stops asking.

When a task says "Needs: …"

Some things genuinely cannot come first. You cannot admit a student before you have a batch to admit them into. Those tasks show a Needs: line naming what has to come first — but the link still works, so nothing is locked away from you. It is a signpost, not a locked door.

"Not applicable"

Schools differ. If you run no transport, press Not applicable on the transport task. It moves into Skipped at the bottom of its group and stops counting against your score. You can bring it back any time.

Doing it for you

A few tasks have a Set this up for me button — HR departments and leave types, payroll heads, account heads, the grading scale, certificate templates. It shows you exactly what it will create before it creates anything, and it only ever adds what is missing. If you have already made some of them yourself, they are left alone.

Bringing in your existing data

The Import button opens the Import Center, which is where students, guardians, staff, classes, subjects, fee heads and old balances come in from your spreadsheets. It handles your column names as they are — see the article "Importing your school's data" for the walkthrough.

Marking the school live

Once Get running is complete you can press Mark school as live. Nothing changes in how CloudSchool behaves; it simply records the day your school went live, and tells our team you are up. Press it when it is true.

If a number looks wrong

The launcher counts only active students and staff, and only batches that are not archived — so an archived batch will not appear in a "how many batches" count. If something still looks wrong, raise a ticket under Support in the sidebar and tell us which task and what you expected.