Terms

Terms of service

Effective 20 September 2026.

These terms apply between NoviaSMS and each school that uses it. A school accepts them when its administrator accepts them while setting the school up, or, for a school NoviaSMS set up for it, when its administrator first signs in. They cover every account the school creates for its staff and the guardians of its students. Our privacy notice says how information is handled and forms part of these terms.

1. The service

NoviaSMS is school management software used in the browser: attendance registers, continuous assessment and examination results with report cards, fee records and receipts on a double-entry ledger, family sign-in for fee statements and released results, staff records and payroll, and the approvals and audit history around them. What the product does today is listed on our home page; anything shown there as planned or in controlled pilot is not part of the service until we say it is.

2. Plans

• Novia Start is free for a school with up to 150 students and 25 staff. It is not a trial that expires. A school that grows past those limits moves to a paid plan.
• Novia School is for larger primary and secondary schools. Its price is agreed with the school in writing when the school is set up and is charged per term. Capabilities shown as planned, such as SMS to parents and automatic fee collection, are switched on for a school only once they have been proven for that school, and are not promised by the plan alone.
• Novia Tertiary is not yet open.

A new school starts on a trial period of four months, matching a school term, after which its plan continues on the terms agreed.

3. The school’s responsibilities

• The school is responsible for the records it enters and for having a lawful basis to hold them, including the consent it records when it links a guardian to a student.
• The school keeps its accounts and passwords confidential, gives each person their own account, removes access when someone leaves, and tells us promptly if it suspects an account has been misused.
• The school names an administrator who is our contact and who alone can ask us for help that reaches the school’s accounts, such as a recovery link.
• The school uses the service only for running the school, and not to store material it has no right to hold, to attack or overload the service, or to try to read another school’s records.

4. NoviaSMS’s responsibilities

• We keep each school’s records apart, as the privacy notice describes, and we process them only on the school’s instructions.
• We take scheduled off-site backups, encrypted before they leave our systems, and we test that a backup can be restored.
• We work to keep the service available, and we tell schools about planned maintenance in advance where we can. We do not promise a particular level of availability, and the service depends on the school’s own internet connection.
• We change the service over time. A change that removes something a school relies on is announced before it happens.

5. Suspension

We may suspend a school’s access if a paid plan is unpaid after we have asked for payment, if the school breaks these terms, or if we must do so to protect other schools or the service. Suspension refuses sign-ins; it does not delete records. We restore access once the reason is resolved.

6. Leaving

A school may close its account at any time by telling us. Its records belong to the school: we prepare an export of them on request, before or after closure, and we delete them 90 days after closure unless the school asks us to keep them longer or a law requires it.

7. Liability

We provide the service with reasonable skill and care. We are not liable for loss caused by inaccurate records a school enters, by the school’s failure to keep its accounts secure, by the school’s connection or devices, or by events outside our control. Our total liability to a school in any twelve months is limited to the amount that school paid us in those twelve months, and to nothing for a school on the free plan. Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited.

8. Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and any dispute that cannot be settled between us is heard by the courts of Nigeria.

9. Changes to these terms

When we change these terms we change the date at the top, and we tell schools of a change that affects them before it takes effect. A school that does not accept a change may leave under section 6.

10. How to contact us

• Through your school: every school has a named administrator who can reach NoviaSMS on the channel agreed when the school was set up.
• Through the form on the home page, for a school that has not yet signed up.

A public email address and telephone number will be added here once each is staffed.