Importing Your Student Roster from Excel and Auto-Assigning PTM Slots by Roll Number

Every school already has its class list somewhere — a spreadsheet the office maintains, an export from whatever student-information system it uses, or just a running Excel file a class teacher keeps updated. Re-typing that roster by hand into a new tool, one student at a time, is exactly the kind of setup friction that makes a school give up on adopting something new before it's even tried. A proper import path removes that step entirely.

What the import actually needs to contain

At minimum: the child's name, and a parent contact (phone, email, or both — WhatsApp reminders need the phone number, email needs the address, and having both is the safer default). Roll number is optional but genuinely useful — it's what lets the auto-assign step later order students predictably, class-list order, rather than whichever parent happens to book first.

Why roll-number order matters for auto-assign, specifically

Self-booking alone always has a tail: a handful of parents who never open the link, whether from a missed message or simply forgetting. A teacher needs a one-click way to fill every remaining open slot with whoever hasn't booked yet — but the ORDER that fill-in happens in matters for fairness and predictability. First-come-first-served among latecomers just rewards whoever happens to check their phone soonest. Roll-number order is the same ordering a class register already uses, so it reads as fair to a parent checking why their child got a particular time, and it's fully automatic — no teacher has to manually decide who goes into which remaining slot.

The three things this changes on the ground

• A brand-new school can go from "nothing set up" to a fully populated roster in minutes, not an afternoon of data entry.
• A teacher never has to manually chase the handful of parents who didn't self-book — one action fills every open slot, in a defensible order.
• Every parent, booked or auto-assigned, gets the exact same WhatsApp and email confirmation — nobody can tell which path put them on the calendar.

This is one piece of a bigger picture — see how the whole PTM day fits together for how import, self-booking, and auto-assign work as one flow rather than three separate steps. If your school also runs whole-class announcements alongside individual meetings, group video sessions are a separate, related feature worth knowing about too.