Global maintenance for parent and student records

Jun 17, 2026

Global maintenance for parent and student records

NOTE: There are two collections of parent/student detail.  The Parent Booking application maintains a collection of parent/student detail where the parent has self registered and entered their own student information.   Other SOBS applications like Notices, Attendance, Permission Slips and Detentions will use a set of parent and student details imported from the schools SIS.

Overview

Global maintenance is a set of school-wide actions for keeping the parent and student list (for the Parent Booking application) tidy between school years. From a single page you can roll every student’s year level forward (or back), delete graduates, remove post-graduate records, drop parents with no students, or clear the whole roster ready for a fresh import.

All of the deletion actions are immediate and cannot be undone, so the page is restricted to staff with the right level of authority.

Who can use this page

The Global maintenance action only appears for staff who are round managers and have the user-maintenance permission. If you do not see the action
menu at the top right of the Parent / Student list, you do not have access — ask your SOBS administrator.

Opening Global maintenance

  1. From the staff menu choose Parent / Student details.
  2. Open the action menu at the top right of the list.
  3. Choose Global maintenance.

The page is organised into three sections: Adjust student year levels, Delete student records, and Delete parent records.

Adjusting student year levels

SOBS normally rolls year levels forward automatically once a year — either on 1 January or 1 July, depending on which school-year cycle you have configured. You can
also do this manually here:

  • Increment all student year levels — moves every student up one year. Use this at the start of a new school year if the automatic roll did not run,
    or if you imported a list before the cutover.
  • Decrement all student year levels — moves every student down one year. This is provided as a safety net in case you ran the increment by
    mistake.

Students whose year level has a future “applies from” date are skipped — the roll only updates students whose current year level is already in effect. A count of
updated students is shown when the operation finishes.

Deleting student records

The page shows up to three delete buttons in this section, depending on what year levels currently exist:

  • Delete all student records — removes every student in the school. Parents and bookings remain. Use this when you are about to import a fresh student
    list.
  • Delete N <year level> students — only appears when students exist in the senior year level (for example “Delete 38 Year 12
    students”). Useful at the end of the year for graduating students.
  • Delete N students above <year level> — only appears when students exist above the senior year level (i.e. records left over from
    previous years).

The two “year level” variants protect students who still have current bookings — those records are skipped and remain in the system. A count of how many were actually
deleted is shown afterwards.

Deleting parent records

  • Delete all parent records — removes every parent (and their students) in the school. Use this as the first step of a complete roster rebuild.
  • Delete parents with no students — removes parent records that no longer have any students attached. Handy after deleting graduates to clean up the
    orphaned parent entries left behind.

Audit trail

Every global maintenance action is recorded in the SOBS server log against your staff name and the school name. Deletion of individual students also writes an entry against the parent’s audit history, so a later View audit records on the parent will show that a particular student was removed. This is the easiest way to confirm what was deleted if a question comes up later.

A note on undoing

None of the deletion buttons on this page can be undone from within SOBS. If you delete a parent or student in error your school’s only options are to restore from a backup or to re-import the records. We strongly recommend exporting the parent list before running any of the bulk deletes.