Terms and Conditions

1. Who we are

BASIC SKUUL is built and operated by PaalTech, a company based in Ghana. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean PaalTech. "You" and "your school" mean the school that holds the account, and everyone who uses it under that account - administrators, head teachers and teaching staff.

By registering a school, or by using an account someone at your school created for you, you agree to these terms.

2. What BASIC SKUUL is

BASIC SKUUL is school management software for Ghanaian basic schools. It holds pupil records, records continuous assessment and examination scores, produces report cards in GES and modern formats, tracks school fees, and gives guardians a portal in which to see their own children's results and balances.

It is a tool for keeping your records. It does not replace your school's own judgement, your obligations to the Ghana Education Service, or any record your school is separately required to keep.

3. Your school's account

• One account belongs to one school. Registrations are reviewed before they are approved, and we may decline or reverse an approval where a registration appears not to be a genuine school.
• The person who registers is responsible for who else they let in. Staff accounts are scoped - a teacher reaches only their own classes and subjects - but it is your school that decides who holds an administrator account.
• Keep passwords to yourself. You are responsible for what is done through your school's accounts. Tell us promptly if you think an account has been reached by someone who should not have it.
• Accounts are for people, not for sharing. A single login passed around a staffroom makes it impossible to tell who changed a mark.

4. Plans, fees and payment

• Free carries unlimited pupils, score entry, report cards and fee tracking, and does not expire.
• Premium is charged per term, at the price shown on the pricing page at the time you pay. It adds bulk import, Excel score import and export, AI-assisted remarks and the guardian portal.
• Premium is charged per term, not per pupil. A school that grows during the term is not charged more for growing.
• We may change our prices. A change never affects a term you have already paid for, and we will show the new price before you renew.
• If you do not renew Premium, nothing is deleted. Your records stay where they are and you keep the Free features; the Premium features stop until you renew.
• Your subscription payments to us are handled by our payment provider. Fees paid for a term are not refundable once that term's Premium features have been used, except where the law says otherwise or where we have clearly failed to provide the service.

Fees for using BASIC SKUUL are separate from the school fees your school collects from guardians through it. We do not take a share of your school's fee income.

School fees collected online

Where your school switches on online fee payment, it connects its own Paystack, Moolre or Hubtel account. Guardians' fee payments go directly from the guardian to your school through that provider. We never hold, route or touch that money.

• Your agreement with that provider is yours, not ours. Their charges, their settlement times and their rules on refunds and chargebacks are between your school and them.
• You are responsible for the credentials you enter. Keep them to the staff who need them, and remove them here if you close the account with the provider.
• We record a payment against a pupil only after the provider confirms it to us directly. If the provider does not confirm, or confirms a different amount, the balance is left as it was and the attempt is recorded as failed.
• We are not responsible for money that fails to reach your school because the credentials were wrong, the account was suspended, or the provider had an outage.

5. Your school's data

Your school's records belong to your school. Your school decides what is collected and why; we hold and process it on your instructions so that the software can do its job. In data protection terms, your school is the controller of its records and we are the processor.

• We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone outside the people needed to run the service.
• We do not use one school's records for another school, and there is no advertising anywhere in the system.
• Access is scoped to the school that owns the record. Our own staff reach school data only where it is needed to support you or to keep the service running.
• You can ask for a copy of your school's data, or ask us to delete it, at any time - see clause 11.
• Aggregate counts that identify nobody - such as how many schools use the system - may be published.
• Payment credentials your school enters are encrypted before they are stored, are never displayed back to anyone once saved, and are used only to open a checkout with your own provider.

PaalTech is Data Protection Certified with the Data Protection Commission, Ghana.

6. Pupils and guardians

Records about children are the most sensitive thing on the system, and your school is responsible for the lawful basis on which it holds them.

• Only enter pupil and guardian details your school is entitled to hold, and keep them accurate.
• Guardians sign in with a phone number your school has on file and a code sent to it by SMS. Whoever holds that phone can see that pupil's results and fee balance, so it is your school's job to keep guardian numbers correct and to update them when they change.
• Results become visible to guardians only once your school publishes them. Publishing is your school's decision, and it locks editing so results cannot drift after they have gone out.

7. Messages we send

We send messages needed to run the service: sign-in codes, notices about your account, and messages your school chooses to send to guardians. Sign-in and account messages cannot be turned off while the account is open, because the account cannot be used without them.

Where your school sends messages to guardians through BASIC SKUUL, your school is responsible for their content and for having a reason to contact that person.

8. AI-generated remarks

Premium can draft teacher remarks from a pupil's scores. These are drafts for a teacher to read, edit and approve - nothing more.

• A generated remark may be wrong, generic, or unsuitable for a particular child. The teacher who publishes it is responsible for what it says.
• Check every remark before publishing. A report card carries your school's name, not ours.

9. Acceptable use

Do not use BASIC SKUUL to:

• break the law, or hold data your school has no right to hold;
• reach another school's records, another teacher's classes, or any part of the system you have not been given;
• probe, scrape, overload or interfere with the service, or attempt to work around its limits or its security;
• resell or rebrand the service as your own;
• upload malware, or anything unlawful or abusive.

We may suspend an account that is doing any of these, and will tell you why. Where the risk to other schools is immediate, we may suspend first and explain straight after.

10. Availability and support

We work to keep BASIC SKUUL available and to keep your records safe, and we take backups. We cannot promise the service will never be interrupted: it depends on internet connectivity, on hosting, and on payment and SMS providers we do not control.

We may take the service down for maintenance, and will avoid end-of-term periods where we reasonably can. Support is by the contact form.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Report cards can be printed and, on Premium, scores can be exported to Excel at any time.

11. Ending your use

• You can stop using BASIC SKUUL whenever you like. Stopping payment for Premium is not the same as closing the account, and does not delete anything.
• Ask us to close your school's account and we will confirm before anything is removed. Before it is closed you may ask for your school's data in a reasonable, usable format.
• We may close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks clause 9, giving you a fair chance to retrieve your data first unless the law prevents it.
• After closure, records are removed from live systems, and residual copies fall out of backups in the ordinary backup cycle.

12. Liability

We are responsible for providing the service with reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for:

• marks, remarks, fee figures or reports that are wrong because of what was entered - the software adds up what it is given;
• decisions your school makes on the strength of what the system shows;
• loss caused by someone at your school sharing a password or leaving an account open;
• interruptions caused by connectivity, hosting, SMS or payment providers.

Where we are liable, our total liability in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees your school paid us in that period. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited - including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service changes. The date at the top always shows when the current version took effect. For a change that materially affects your school, we will give notice in the app or by email before it applies. Continuing to use BASIC SKUUL after that means you accept the new terms.

14. Cookies

BASIC SKUUL uses only cookies that are strictly necessary. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, and no third-party trackers anywhere on this site or in the app.

Because all of these are needed for the site to work, or are stored only in your own browser, we show a notice rather than ask for consent - there is nothing to switch off that would not simply break signing in. If we ever add anything that tracks you, we will ask first.

You can clear or block cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the session cookie will stop you being able to sign in.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Ghana, and the courts of Ghana have jurisdiction over any dispute. If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms, or about how your school's data is handled, go to PaalTech - or use the contact form, which reaches the same place.