Software for weekend and Sunday Islamic schools

A weekend school runs on about three hours a week and a lot of goodwill. Nearly every piece of school software is designed for the opposite — a full-time school with a full-time office — and the mismatch shows up in small, daily ways: an attendance screen that takes six taps per child when you have four minutes before the first lesson, a billing model that assumes monthly invoices when you charge by the term, a teacher account that exposes the whole school to a volunteer.

Saturday morning, realistically

The register has to be takeable on a phone, standing up, by someone who was handed the class ten minutes ago. MarkTrack's attendance is built for that: a class list, one tap per child, and native iPhone and Android apps so a teacher is not pinching at a desktop layout. Dates are computed in your organization's own timezone, which matters more than it sounds once you start recording anything after hours.

If your school has a pickup problem — and most weekend schools do, because two hundred families arrive in the same fifteen minutes — the sign in and sign out tools replace the clipboard with a PIN kiosk or a printed QR code on the door, and leave you with a live board showing who is still waiting and a record of exactly who collected each child.

Volunteers who change every term

Weekend schools are staffed by people who teach for two terms and then move. That makes permissions a real problem, not a theoretical one.

Teachers are invited by email, see only the classes they actually take, and can be deactivated the moment they stop teaching. Nobody inherits a shared login, and nobody keeps access to the roster after they leave. The office keeps a full audit trail of who changed what.

Billing by the term, to the family

Weekend school fees are their own shape: a per-term charge rather than a monthly one, a registration fee in September, siblings at a reduced rate, and a handful of families who pay cash and always will.

MarkTrack handles all of that from the enrolment form itself — the registration fee is collected when the parent applies, the card is kept on file, and the recurring schedule starts once you accept. Autopay can be off, offered or required per form, so you can encourage it without forcing it on the families who will never use it. Invoices are family-level, so a parent with three children gets one bill rather than three. You can also keep invoice records without taking card payments at all, and switch card payments on later.

Running alongside a full-time academy

Many weekend schools are the second programme of an organization that also runs a full-time academy. Both live under one organization in MarkTrack, each with its own roster, teachers, classes and tuition — and a family with a child in each has one login, one card on file and one invoice. This is the single most common reason schools move to us from software that assumes one school per account.

What a small school actually needs on day one

• A class list and a register that works on a phone.
• Parent accounts, so questions stop arriving by text message to the principal.
• A record of Qāʿidah or Hifz progress that survives a teacher leaving.
• An invoice you did not have to write by hand.

That is a first afternoon, not a project. Bring the spreadsheet you already keep and the AI import will map the columns itself and create the family accounts once you have checked them.