Transport, hostel & library

Transport: create routes with ordered stops (pickup times, per-stop fares), attach vehicle + driver, assign students to stops. Drivers run trips from their portal — departure/return with per-student custody, and an SOS button. Fleet tracks fitness/insurance/permit expiries and fuel & maintenance costs per vehicle.

Hostel is organised hostel → section → room → bed. Each hostel is marked *boys*, *girls*, *mixed* or *staff*, and an allocation that would put someone in the wrong one is refused before it is refused for being full — a full hostel is an inconvenience, the other thing is not.

The Structure tab is the first step, and it is in that order for a reason.

1. Add the hostel. Name, location, warden, contact — and *who it is for*: boys, girls, mixed or staff. That last one is not a label. It is the only setting in the system that can refuse a cross-gender allocation, so *mixed* should be a deliberate choice rather than a way past the field. Set the curfew here too, or leave it empty for none: absent is a different thing from midnight, and a default nobody chose manufactures breaches at 00:01.
2. Add sections. A wing, a block, a floor — whatever your wardens already call it. Sections exist so a roll call, a duty shift and a night round can each cover part of a building instead of all of it.
3. Add rooms inside a section, with their bed count, rent and mess rate.
4. Register occupants and allocate them beds.

A room must belong to a section, and it is refused if it does not. A room with no hostel above it has no boys/girls setting, so nobody can be allocated into it at all — the room list marks any such room, and the fix is to file it under a section.

Also on this tab: sending institutes, the neighbouring schools whose boarders you house and bill as one party. Add these before registering their students as occupants.

Neighbouring institutes often ask you to accommodate their students or staff. Those people are registered as external occupants: they get a bed, meals, a roll-call line and a bill, and they get no portal, no login and no student record. Nothing about them touches your enrolment counts, admissions funnel, class lists or student reports.

Because they carry no card and no app, each external is issued a short mess code to type at the mess door.

The institute that sent them is recorded as a sponsor, and the sponsor is who you bill. Detail stays per person — you still know which boarder ate which meals and who broke a window — but the invoice, the statement and any deposit refund go to the institute, which distributes to its own families. An external with no sponsor simply bills themselves.

• Out-pass — same day, back by evening, with in/out custody.
• Home leave — multi-day, with the guardian's consent recorded and by what channel. Approved leave suppresses roll-call absence: a boarder who went home for Eid with written permission must not accumulate the same record as one who climbed a wall — especially once hostel conduct feeds a character score.
• Late return — derived from the gate against the hostel's own curfew and grace period, and raised as a conduct incident, because that is what it is. A hostel with no curfew set enforces none.

Occupancy, external guests, out-passes, mess charges, deposits, the infirmary log, the leave register and roll-call coverage are all in Reports → Hostel, and Ask Ilmora reaches them by name — *"who is still out"*, *"mess charges last month"*, *"deposits we are holding"*.

The night register suggests a status for every boarder — anyone already on approved leave or out-pass is marked as such — but a warden still confirms it. Occupancy, external guests, the leave register and roll-call coverage are in Reports → Hostel.

Three things that usually live in a notebook in one room:

Infirmary — sick-bay visits with what was reported, what was given, and the temperature. The header shows how many boarders are still unwell, because that is what somebody coming on duty needs first. Sending a boarder out for treatment requires recording that the guardian was told — a child does not leave for hospital with nobody responsible for them informed.

Night rounds — logged per hostel. Each hostel declares how many rounds a night it expects, and a night that falls short is flagged. That is the whole value: a rounds log with gaps is information, while no log at all is an assumption. A hostel set to zero expected rounds simply does not run them and is never reported short.

Duty roster — who is responsible, per hostel and shift. One warden per hostel, section and shift on a night; a second assignment is refused rather than quietly accepted, because two people each believing the other was covering is the 2am failure worth preventing.

Hostel work no longer requires school-settings rights. hostel.warden covers roll call, out-passes and leave; hostel.manage covers rooms and allocations; hostel.view is read-only. Grant hostel.warden to your wardens from Roles & permissions.

Library: catalog with per-copy accession numbers; issue/return to students or staff; overdue fines assessed automatically. Reservations queue for wanted titles; stock-take reconciles shelves vs records. Overdue loans with guardian phones is the chase list.