A Gradelink alternative built for Islamic schools

Schools rarely leave a student information system because it is bad. They leave because it was designed around a school that is not theirs. Gradelink has been doing private-school administration for a long time and does it competently — the reason Islamic schools come looking is almost always the same three things, and none of them are about the gradebook.

1. Qur'an progress is a record, not a subject

In a general-purpose SIS, the only place to put Hifz is a subject in the gradebook. So a school invents a scheme: a percentage that stands for juz completed, or a comment field a teacher fills in when there is time, or — most often — a spreadsheet on one teacher's laptop that nobody else can read.

MarkTrack stores the daily lesson as what it actually is. Sabaq, sabqi and manzil are recorded separately, with the passage covered, the mistakes and hesitations behind it, and the teacher's note. From that it builds juz-by-juz progress and a projected completion date, and shows the parent the same thing in the portal and in the iPhone and Android apps. A child consolidating through revision is not shown as having made no progress, because revision is recorded in its own right.

The same applies further down. A Qāʿidah lesson is not a percentage either — it is a chapter, or a page and a line, or a tajwīd rule, and every maktab writes it differently. The Qaidah Tracker takes all three notations so a teacher records the way they already do.

2. Most Islamic schools are more than one school

A general-purpose SIS assumes one school, meeting five days a week, with one timetable. The typical Islamic school is a full-time academy and a weekend program and an evening maktab, often sharing families, sometimes sharing a building, rarely sharing a timetable.

In MarkTrack those are separate programs under one organization. Each has its own students, teachers, classes and tuition. A family with a child in two of them still gets one login, one card on file and one invoice — which is the part that is genuinely painful to bolt onto software that was not designed for it.

3. Billing is a family problem, not a student problem

Islamic schools bill families with three, four and five children, frequently at different rates, sometimes across two programs, often with a sibling discount that someone works out by hand each September.

MarkTrack sets the arrangement up at the point of enrollment rather than afterwards: the application form collects the registration fee, keeps the card on file, and starts the recurring tuition schedule once you accept the application. Autopay can be off, offered or required per form, rates can differ per child and per campus, and schedules end automatically at the end of the year. There is a fuller walkthrough in how MarkTrack collects tuition from parents.

What switching actually involves

The honest answer is that the data move is the part schools dread and it is usually the easiest part. Export whatever your current system gives you — or use the roster spreadsheet the office keeps by hand — and MarkTrack's AI import maps the columns for you, shows you the students, parents and families it found, and creates the accounts once you approve them. You do not reformat the file first.

What takes longer is agreeing internally on your fee structure and your grading scheme, because most schools discover they have three versions of both. That conversation is worth having regardless of which software you pick.

When Gradelink is the better answer

If you run a single, conventional full-time school with no Qur'an programme to speak of, no weekend programme, and you are happy with what you have, there is no case for switching and we would not try to make one. The argument for MarkTrack is specific: it is for schools whose Islamic programme is the thing their software cannot see.