Bridgerose Academy:
480 learners, 5 spreadsheets → one operating system.

Bridgerose Academy is a 480-learner private academy in Nairobi running Grade 1 to Grade 9 on the CBC curriculum. Until early 2026 the school was operating like most Kenyan academies its size — competent staff, willing parents, and five Excel sheets holding the whole operation together by good intentions.

The problem

The school was profitable but invisible to itself. The bursar reconciled M-Pesa SMS receipts by hand every evening. The deputy maintained the CBC marks workbook personally — it lived on one laptop. The class teachers sent SMS reminders to parents from their own phones, on their own bundles, when they remembered to. Three concrete pain points:

• Fee leakage. Some parents paid M-Pesa receipts that never matched an account because of typos in the reference field. By end of term, KES 180,000–240,000 was sitting in the till as "unreconciled" — money the school had been paid but couldn't see.
• CBC reports printed in panic. The deputy spent the last week of every term re-keying marks into a Word template so the head could sign before closing day.
• Parent communication was inconsistent. Class 5 parents got two reminders that term; Class 7 parents got none, because the Class 7 teacher had a baby.

The brief

"We need one system. We need parents to actually get reminders. We need the M-Pesa to add up. And the head needs to see whether we're in trouble before term 3 starts, not after."

What we built

A clean rollout of Owldid Systems, scoped down to what the school actually needed in term 2 and ready to grow into term 3 onwards:

• Admissions and enrolment — every learner, parent, and fee tier in one place, role-based so the bursar can't see exam marks and the deputy can't see fee balances.
• M-Pesa Daraja STK Push + Paybill reconciliation — parents pay from their phone or the existing Paybill, receipts attach to the right account automatically, the bursar's "needs review" queue is short and visible. See our Daraja deep-dive.
• CBC strand/sub-strand marks — class teachers enter scores week by week, the system computes the competency level, the report card prints itself. See the CBC template guide.
• Africa's Talking SMS — fee receipts, attendance alerts, exam results, term-end notices. Triggered by the system, not by a teacher remembering.
• Parent portal — mobile-friendly. Balance, receipts, report card download, message the class teacher. No app install.
• Head's dashboard — fees collected vs expected, attendance flags, CBC progress at a glance.

The timeline

• Week 1: data audit, cleaned learner and parent records, mapped fee tiers, set up sandbox.
• Week 2: imported all 480 learners, configured M-Pesa Daraja against the school's existing Paybill, trained bursar and deputy.
• Week 3: side-by-side run for 5 days, class-teacher training (60 minutes each), Daraja go-live, parent onboarding SMS, cutover on a Monday.

The result

After one full term on the system:

• Term-2 fee collection rate jumped from 64% to 93% on time. Automatic SMS reminders + receipts + a public parent balance did most of the work.
• The bursar saved ~6 hours a week. Reconciliation is now a 10-minute morning ritual instead of a 90-minute evening one.
• CBC reports printed on time, without panic. The deputy added comments instead of re-keying marks.
• Unreconciled M-Pesa fell to under KES 5,000 per term — almost entirely typos that the system flagged within a day.
• The head can see fee risk by week 4 of every term. Term 3 planning got better immediately.

What this rollout is worth, if you need something similar

A school-of-this-size rollout of Owldid Systems — setup, M-Pesa Daraja integration on an existing Paybill, CBC schema mapping, data migration, training and post-go-live support — is now KES 9,999 per month for a school under 500 pupils, with no upfront cost. Setup, training and data import are included in the subscription rather than charged separately. Above 500 pupils the price scales with pupil count and is quoted per school.

If your school is on spreadsheets and you can see term 3 from here, this is the time. See Owldid Systems →

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