SMS

The SMS screen sends messages to guardians, students and staff. It also hosts automatic attendance-triggered SMS rules.

Prerequisite

SMS requires a connected SMS gateway. See to connect one.

Sending a manual message

1. Open SMS.
2. Choose the recipients — an individual, a class, a section, guardians of a class, staff, and so on.
3. Type the message (or pick a saved template).
4. Send.

Sent messages appear in Delivery logs.

Automatic SMS (attendance-triggered)

ApexityEdu can send SMS automatically when attendance events happen. Configure this in SMS → Automatic (administrator/staff).

The master switch

There is one master switch (SMS automation). It is off by default — no school spends money on SMS without opting in. Turning it off silences every automatic message instantly, whatever the individual rules say.

Rules — one per event

Each attendance event has its own independently switchable rule:

Event	Fires when
present	A student is recorded present for the day.
late	The arrival punch is past the grace period.
absent	A student has no punch after the day is closed out (fired by the hourly sweep — never on weekends, days off or holidays, and never for a student on approved leave).
early_out	The out-punch is before the school day ends.
in_punch	Every arrival, regardless of present/late.
out_punch	Every departure, regardless of timing.

What each rule configures

• Audience — guardians, the student, both, or the staff member.
• Message — an inline body, or a saved template. Templates support {{variables}} such as student_name, roll, class_name, section_name, date, in_time, out_time, late_minutes, status, school_name. Unknown placeholders are removed automatically, never sent raw.
• Thresholds — e.g. a minimum lateness (min_late_minutes) so a two-minute delay doesn’t trigger an SMS.
• Send window — e.g. only after first period, once absence is confirmed.
• Quiet hours — never message a guardian at 3am.
• Rate limits — a per-recipient daily cap and a minimum gap (throttle_minutes).
• Scope — restrict the rule to specific classes.

Answering “why didn’t the guardian get an SMS?”

Every decision — sent and suppressed — is written to a dispatch log with a human-readable reason. Open SMS → Automatic → Dispatch log to see exactly why a message went out or was held back (“Daily cap reached”, “Inside quiet hours”, “Late by 3 min, below the 10 min threshold”, and so on).

Sent automatic messages are also mirrored into Delivery logs, so manual and automatic messages appear together.

Absence messages — how they work

Absence has no punch to trigger it, so the scheduled absence sweep marks un-punched students absent after the school’s close time (see Attendance). That is what fires the absent rule.

Two independent guards keep absence messages holiday-safe:

1. The sweep refuses to create absences on weekends, days off or holidays.
2. The SMS layer re-checks the date before dispatching any absence message.

So a manual mark on a holiday can’t text guardians either.

Admission SMS

Admissions have their own SMS settings, configured per form (see Admissions). Student and teacher forms message different people with different variables.

Tips

• Start with the master switch off, then enable only the rules you want.
• Set quiet hours and daily caps so you don’t over-message or message at night.
• Use the dispatch log whenever a guardian says they didn’t receive a message — it tells you exactly why.