Terms of Service

1. The service

Sukuufie is a web-based school-management service for schools in Ghana, from kindergarten to senior high. Depending on the plan, it includes a pupil register, attendance (including offline marking), assessments and report cards, timetabling, fee invoicing and receipts, online fee collection, staff records and clock-in, a parent portal, and SMS and WhatsApp messaging to guardians and staff.

The school is our customer. Parents, guardians, pupils and staff use Sukuufie because the school has chosen to use it; they are not parties to this agreement, and the school is responsible for how it uses the service with them.

2. Your account

• The person who creates the account must be authorised to act for the school. They become the school’s first administrator and can add further users.
• The school is responsible for everything done under its account and by its users, for keeping passwords and one-time codes confidential, and for removing users who leave the school. Tell us promptly at support@handitechlime.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
• Each user must have their own login. Sharing logins defeats the audit trail that protects the school’s records.
• You must give us accurate account and contact details and keep them up to date. We use them to send invoices, service notices and security messages.

3. Free trial

A new school may start with a free trial of 14 days with no card required. Trial accounts have full features but smaller limits (for example on the number of pupils and monthly messages). We may extend a trial — for instance for schools that book an onboarding call — at our discretion.

When the trial ends, the school chooses a paid plan to keep going. A trial that has not moved to a paid plan within a short grace period (currently 3 days) is suspended: nobody at the school can sign in until a plan is chosen, but the school’s data is kept and is fully restored on upgrade. A trial account left suspended is eventually closed and its data deleted under section 10.

One trial per school. We may withdraw a trial that is being used to avoid paying or for anything in section 8.

4. Plans and billing

Plans

Paid plans, their prices, limits and included features are set out on our pricing page and in the school’s billing settings. Plans are priced in Ghana cedis and billed per term cycle (three billings a year), with other billing cycles offered where shown. A plan’s limits — such as the maximum number of pupils and the monthly SMS allowance — are enforced by the service; moving to a larger plan lifts them.

Invoices and payment

• We issue a subscription invoice at the start of each billing cycle, plus any SMS overage from the previous cycle (section 5). Invoices are available in the school’s billing settings and are sent to the school’s administrators.
• Invoices are due on the date shown on them. You can pay online by mobile money or card through Paystack, or by any other method we agree with you.
• Prices are stated exclusive of any taxes we are required to charge, unless we say otherwise.
• Fees for a billing cycle already started are not refundable, except where the law requires or we agree in writing.

Changing plans

You may move up to a larger plan at any time; the change takes effect straight away and any difference is billed for the remainder of the cycle. You may move down or cancel for the next cycle by telling us before it starts.

Price changes

We may change plan prices with at least 30 days’ notice to the school’s administrators. A price change applies from the school’s next billing cycle after the notice period.

5. SMS and WhatsApp messaging

• Each paid plan includes a monthly SMS allowance. Trial and free plans have a fixed allowance that cannot be exceeded.
• On a paid plan, if the school sends more than its allowance in a month, messages keep going out (up to a ceiling of a further allowance’s worth) and the excess is charged at the per-message overage rate shown in the school’s billing settings, on the next subscription invoice.
• The school may also buy prepaid SMS credits in bundles. Credits are spent only after the monthly allowance and any overage headroom are used up, do not expire while the account is open, and are not refundable once bought.
• WhatsApp messages are delivered through Meta’s WhatsApp Business platform and are subject to Meta’s policies; a school using WhatsApp must comply with them.
• Delivery depends on mobile networks and gateways we do not control. We will report delivery status where the network provides it, but we cannot guarantee that any particular message is delivered or delivered on time.
• The school is responsible for the content of its messages and for having the right to contact each recipient. Bulk messaging that is not connected to the school’s relationship with the recipient (for example unsolicited marketing) is not permitted.

6. Online fee collection

If the school chooses to accept fees online, it connects its own bank or mobile-money settlement account through Paystack, and fees paid by guardians are settled directly to the school’s account. Handitech never holds or has access to the school’s fee income.

• The school must give accurate settlement details and is responsible for them. Payouts are made by Paystack under its own terms and timelines.
• A platform fee, stated when you connect your account and on your pricing page, plus Paystack’s transaction fee, is deducted from each online payment at the time it is made.
• Refunds of online payments are initiated by the school from within Sukuufie and are returned to the payer through Paystack; the platform fee on a refunded payment is not returned unless we agree otherwise.
• Guardians pay on Paystack’s secure checkout. Card and wallet credentials never pass through Sukuufie.

7. Late payment and suspension

If a subscription invoice is not paid by its due date, we will remind the school’s administrators. If it remains unpaid past a grace period of 7 days after the due date, the school’s account may be automatically suspended: users cannot sign in and messages stop, but no data is deleted. Settling the overdue invoice reactivates the account automatically. An account that stays suspended for non-payment is eventually closed under section 10.

We may also suspend an account, on notice where practicable, where we reasonably believe it is being used in breach of section 8 or in a way that threatens the security or integrity of the service. We will lift a suspension as soon as the cause is resolved.

8. Acceptable use

The school agrees that it and its users will not:

• enter or send anything unlawful, defamatory, abusive or misleading, or that infringes anyone’s rights;
• use the messaging features to send spam, unsolicited marketing, or messages unrelated to the school’s relationship with the recipient;
• record personal data about pupils, guardians or staff without the lawful basis the school needs under Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), or record data that is not needed to run the school;
• attempt to gain access to another school’s data or to any part of the service you are not authorised to use, probe or test the security of the service without our written consent, or interfere with its operation;
• copy, resell, sub-license or offer the service to anyone other than the school’s own users, or use it to build a competing product; or
• remove or obscure any notices, or misrepresent your relationship with Handitech.

9. Your data

• The school owns its data. The records you enter — pupils, guardians, staff, attendance, results, fees and messages — belong to the school. You grant us only the licence we need to host, process, back up and display them in order to provide the service.
• Roles under Act 843. For that data, the school is the data controller and Handitech is its data processor. We process it only to provide the service and on the school’s instructions, keep it confidential, protect it with appropriate security, use only the sub-processors listed in our Privacy Policy, help the school respond to requests from data subjects, and tell the school without undue delay if we become aware of a breach affecting its data. Handitech is the controller of the school’s account and billing data.
• The school’s responsibilities. The school is responsible for the accuracy of what it enters, for who it gives access to, for informing parents, guardians and staff about how their data is used, and for obtaining any consent the law requires — particularly for pupils, who are children. The school must comply with Act 843 in its own use of the service.
• Separation. Each school’s data is kept separate from every other school’s and is never shared between schools.
• Backups. We back up the service daily. Backups exist to recover the service as a whole; they are not a substitute for the school’s own exports.
• Aggregate use. We may use anonymised, aggregated statistics that cannot identify any school or person (for example, how many report cards are produced each term) to operate and improve the service.

10. Leaving Sukuufie

• The school may cancel at any time by telling us. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle unless the school asks to close sooner.
• Data export. At any time while the account is open, and on request during the wind-down period, the school can obtain a complete export of its data as a set of CSV files (one per record type) in a zip archive, and may print or download its report cards, timetables and invoices as PDFs. We never hold a school’s records hostage: an export is available whether or not the school owes us money.
• Deletion. After an account is closed — by cancellation, or by prolonged suspension under sections 3 or 7 — we keep the school’s data for a wind-down period [to be confirmed, e.g. 90 days] so it can be restored or exported, then delete it from live systems. Backups roll off on their schedule after that. We keep billing records for as long as tax and company law require.

11. Availability and support

We work hard to keep Sukuufie available and fast, and we design it so that attendance keeps working offline when the connection is poor. However, we do not guarantee any particular level of availability and this agreement does not include a service-level agreement or service credits. The service may be unavailable during planned maintenance (which we will try to schedule outside Ghanaian school hours and announce in advance), or because of faults, or because of events outside our control such as power, network or hosting-provider outages.

Support is available by phone, WhatsApp and email during the hours shown on our website. We will respond to reported problems as quickly as we reasonably can, prioritising anything that stops a school from working. Onboarding assistance is included as described for the school’s plan.

We may change, add or retire features from time to time. We will give reasonable notice before removing a feature the school relies on.

12. Intellectual property

Sukuufie, its software, design, documentation and the Sukuufie name and mark belong to Handitech. Nothing in these terms transfers them to the school. The school keeps all rights in its own data and in its own name, logo and report-card branding, and grants us a licence to display them within the service. If the school gives us suggestions or feedback, we may use them without obligation.

13. Limitation of liability

Sukuufie is provided “as is”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties and conditions not expressly stated in these terms, including any implied warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free or fit for a particular purpose.

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, business or goodwill, or loss or corruption of data that the school could have avoided by taking an export;
• we are not liable for failures of third-party services we rely on but do not control, including mobile networks, SMS and WhatsApp delivery, Paystack, banks and mobile-money operators, and hosting providers;
• we are not liable for the content of the school’s records or messages, or for how the school uses the service with its pupils, guardians and staff; and
• our total liability to the school for all claims arising under or in connection with this agreement in any 12-month period is limited to the total subscription fees the school paid us in that period.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under Ghanaian law.

The school will indemnify us against claims by third parties arising from the school’s breach of section 8 or section 9, including claims that the school lacked the right to record or message someone.

14. Ending the agreement

Either party may end this agreement for convenience as described in section 10. We may end it immediately on notice if the school seriously or repeatedly breaches these terms and does not put it right within 14 days of being asked, or if the school becomes insolvent. On ending, the school’s right to use the service stops, any unpaid invoices become due, and sections 9, 10, 12, 13, 15 and any other terms that by their nature should survive continue to apply.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Ghana. Any dispute that we cannot resolve between us in good faith within 30 days may be referred to the courts of Ghana, which have exclusive jurisdiction, without prejudice to either party’s right to seek urgent relief in any court. [Counsel to confirm whether an arbitration or mediation step is preferred.]

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service and the law change. We will notify the school’s administrators inside Sukuufie or by email at least 14 days before a material change takes effect (price changes carry the longer notice in section 4). The effective date at the top of this page will change. If the school does not accept a change it may cancel before the change takes effect; continued use after that date means the updated terms apply.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the plan details shown in the school’s billing settings, are the whole agreement between the school and Handitech about Sukuufie. If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Neither party is liable for delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control. The school may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it to a successor who takes over the service, on notice to the school.

17. Contact