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Answers to questions that come up most often from administrators, teaching staff, and parents. For step-by-step instructions, follow the links to the relevant feature page.

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Getting started

Sign up on the Zion site and add a card. Nothing is charged, and you get the complete product free for 30 days. Zion then walks you through a short setup wizard that creates your school, its first learning centre, and your academic term. You do not need to wait on the Zion team to open an account for you. See Getting started and Billing.
Yes. An administrator uploads it in Settings, under School, and Zion uses it across the app in place of the default mark. See School settings.
Yes. Grading has a Prior PACE path for exactly this, so a student who joins partway through the year arrives with their completed PACEs already on record and their reports read correctly from the start. You can record these one at a time or in bulk. See Score entry.

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Parent and student portals

Yes. The parent portal is a read-mostly area where a parent sees a per-child view of progress, attendance, homework, behaviour, grades, and report cards, plus a way to book meetings with staff. See Parent portal overview.
Yes. A signed-in student gets a read-mostly view of their own homework, goals, grades, progress, attendance, calendar, activities, and notifications. See Student portal overview.
Access comes from an accepted parent invitation linking the parent’s account to a specific student, not from an email address matching a student record. A pending or rejected invitation grants no access. If a child is missing from a parent’s dashboard, the school needs to check the invitation status.
No. Zion works out which student is looking from the account they signed in with, so a student only ever sees their own record.
A staff member sends the invitation by hand from the parent’s record. Zion never links a family automatically. An invitation that has not been accepted yet can be revoked, and a parent who has already accepted can be detached from a student if the link was made in error. See Parent portal overview.

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Meetings

A meeting is an in-person conversation between a parent and their child’s supervisor or monitor. Parents, supervisors, monitors, and administrators all work with meetings. Teaching staff accounts other than the assigned supervisor or monitor, and student accounts, do not have access to this area. See Meetings overview.
A parent can claim an open slot that staff published in advance, which books immediately with no waiting on a response. Or a parent and staff member can negotiate a time back and forth as a request. See Availability and Booking and requests.

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Billing

Zion bills schools through Polar, which acts as the merchant of record. Polar collects payment and remits tax in every market Zion sells into. Prices are quoted and charged in USD with no currency conversion applied at checkout. See Billing overview.
Starter is 199amonthforupto50students,Liteis199 a month for up to 50 students, Lite is 399 for up to 150, Standard is 799forupto400,andEnterpriseis799 for up to 400, and Enterprise is 4,000 for an unlimited roster. Paying yearly costs the same as ten months. Every new school starts on a 30-day free trial of the complete product. See Billing overview.
Administrators manage subscriptions from Settings, under the Billing tab. Supervisors and monitors see a read-only summary of the same status. Parents and students do not see billing screens, except for a notice if a school’s subscription lapses.

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Data import and export

Yes. Go to Import, under Administration, which administrators can reach. It reads a spreadsheet, walks you through matching your columns to Zion’s, shows you a preview of exactly what will change, and then applies the whole thing at once or not at all. It covers students, PACE progress, and grades. Attendance history is not something you can import, because attendance records from older systems are too inconsistent to bring across reliably. See Importing data and the spreadsheet templates.
Yes. Learning centres, staff invitations, library books, and PACE booklet stock each take a spreadsheet directly from their own screen, with a template you can download first. See Spreadsheet templates.
See Migration concierge for what a guided migration covers.
Settings has a Data Export tab that builds a downloadable bundle of your school’s records. Each request produces a spreadsheet per kind of record plus a PDF snapshot, and it prepares in the background so you can carry on working. Administrators and supervisors can request one. See Exporting your school data.

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Behaviour

Merit, demerit, and incident events logged against a category catalog that an administrator defines. Each event carries signed points, and Zion computes a running net balance and timeline per student. See Behaviour overview.
Administrators, supervisors, and monitors log and review these events. Parents see the same balance and timeline for their own linked children, with private staff notes removed from what they can read.

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Homework

A home-study assignment tied to a specific PACE page range, not a graded file upload. A supervisor or monitor assigns a page range from one of a student’s active PACEs, the family marks it done at home, and the teacher confirms it was actually completed before it counts as verified. See Homework overview.

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The PACE catalog

Every school starts with the shared ICCE Africa catalog. It covers the core subjects numbered from 1001, Bible Reading, and the elective and Lifepac range. Elective and Lifepac courses carry a course code rather than a PACE number, so they sit outside the numbered progression. See PACE catalog.
Yes. An administrator can add your school’s own subjects and PACEs in Settings, under PACEs, and can correct a PACE’s page count and level when the printed booklet differs from what Zion has.

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Report cards

A report card covers one term. The Supervisor’s Progress Card covers the whole year on a single page, showing each PACE the student has worked through with completed ones colour-coded by the term they finished in. It downloads as a PDF and can be emailed to a parent. See Progress cards.
A student’s per-term data compiled into a single PDF: PACE grades, test scores, attendance, Goal Check completion, and parent-safe character notes. See Report cards overview.
Administrators generate report cards for any centre and manage templates. Supervisors and monitors generate and distribute report cards for their assigned centre or centres. Parents view and download the ones published to them.

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Roles

Administrator, supervisor, monitor, parent, and student. “Teaching staff” is the label Zion uses for administrators, supervisors, and monitors together, not a separate role in its own right. See Roles and permissions.
Both are scoped to their assigned learning centres and both work directly with students and parents day to day, covering meetings, Goal Check, attendance, grading, homework, behaviour, and report cards for their centres. Consult Roles and permissions for the exact breakdown by feature.
Yes. Everything a supervisor or monitor sees is scoped to the learning centres an administrator has assigned them to, whether that is one centre or several.

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Terminology reference

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