ERP enquiry register & document numbering: the top of the admissions funnel¶

Kwilo's enquiry was a bare contact card — name, phone, email, source — so the desk couldn't answer the questions every follow-up call needs: which class are they seeking, where does the child study today? Worse, the pipeline forgot itself: a parent who enquired last month and walked in to register was treated as a stranger. And schools migrating to Kwilo had no way to shape their document numbers — no school prefix, no session token, no way to continue a historical sequence. This doc covers the three fixes: the standard enquiry register, already-enquired detection with prefill on the registration form, and configurable document numbers for enquiry, application, and admission.

Status: built — user-driven (direct product feedback on the staging enquiry form: missing class/school/address, plus the stated admission-number struggle). Code PR MySetu-AI/kwiloai_webapp#1473 (branch feat/erp-enquiry-numbering); this doc lands with it.

Related: erp-registration.md (the registration form this feeds — its deep-link prefill and the "already enquired" banner), erp-student-standard-fields.md (where the data ultimately lands at admit).

Why this exists¶

Who asked: Direct product feedback while dogfooding staging — "we don't know which class they're enquiring for, where they study, address, email" and "we're struggling with how admission numbers are generated". Grounded in the same school-ERP research as the registration module (SchoolEarth / Fedena / OpenEduCat's ir.sequence).
User pain: (a) A counsellor calling back an enquiry has no context — the register can't say which class or school the child is in. (b) A clerk registering a walk-in retypes everything a colleague captured at enquiry time, and nothing tells them the enquiry exists. (c) A school whose admission numbers look like SIS/2026-27/1450 cannot reproduce — or continue — that sequence in Kwilo.
Cost of not doing it: The enquiry register isn't usable as a follow-up tool, double data entry at the desk, and the numbering gap reads as "this ERP can't do our admission numbers" in evaluations.
Validated: User-stated pain on live staging usage; the field set and numbering behaviours mirror the mainstream school ERPs.
Worked when: a counsellor can run a follow-up from the register alone; registering a phone number that already enquired links + prefills in one click; a school sets SIS/ + session year + "continue from 1450" and the next admission number is SIS/2026-27/1450. Sean Ellis: remove it and the desk asks "why doesn't it remember this parent enquired last week?"

Mental model¶

Enquiry register. The enquiry stays a 30-second quick capture but now carries the standard particulars: student name (the child — not the caller), parent/guardian name, class seeking admission, current school + class, address, contact, source, notes, follow-ups. Every enquiry gets an enquiry number the moment it's logged.

The funnel remembers. Two directions:

Enquiry → registration: the deep link prefills the full register (parent → guardian, current school/class → previous school/last class, class applying, address) via one shared map.
Registration → enquiry: typing a phone that exactly matches an open (non-converted) enquiry surfaces "{name} already enquired on {date} for {class}" with Link & prefill — links the enquiry (converted on save) and fills only empty fields, never overwriting what the clerk typed.

Document numbers — generated at the natural moment, shaped per org:

Document	Number allocated when	Default
Enquiry	logged	`ENQ000001`
Application (registration)	registration created	`APP000001`
Admission	at admit (the transaction minting the student)	`ADM000001`

erp.number_format_configs (org × doc type) shapes the string: literal prefix (SIS/), optional Indian session-year token (2026-27/, April–March), zero-pad width, plus a forward-only next-start that bumps the existing race-safe counter — continuing a historical sequence or renumbering at session start. Managed in ERP Settings → Document numbering with live next-number previews (manager-gated).

Design decisions¶

No config row = exactly the historical behaviour. Existing tenants see nothing until they opt in.
No automatic session reset. Schools reset explicitly via next-start — an auto-reset that silently restarts numbering is a support incident waiting to happen.
Forward-only next-start. Backwards would mint duplicate numbers; the API 422s instead.
Exact-match phone detection, not fuzzy — a dedup banner must not fire on partial matches; the fuzzy search remains for humans browsing.
Link fills empty fields only. An explicit link action still must not destroy typed input.
Manual admission-number override stays (historical imports), dup-checked.
Enquiry-number backfill: existing enquiries get numbers in creation order per org, and the counter syncs past the max — no unnumbered legacy rows.

Non-goals¶

Receipt numbers stay REC###### — the config table is doc-type-generic; receipts can join when asked for.
No phone normalization in v1 — detection matches the string as stored; formatting drift between entries defeats it (documented limitation).
No enquiry-to-application analytics (conversion funnels) — the linkage now exists to build them on.

Risks & mitigations¶

Number format changes mid-stream produce mixed-format registers. That's inherent (and true of every ERP); the audit trail records each format change.
Backfill ordering uses created_at, id — deterministic; the migration is literal SQL with the counter sync in the same transaction.

Rollout¶

erp0025 is additive + backfill; deploy-safe ahead of UI.
Formats are opt-in per org via ERP Settings.
Follow-ups: phone normalization for detection; receipts joining the format system; enquiry→registration conversion metrics.

Changelog¶

2026-08-01 — Built end-to-end (register fields, detection + prefill, ENQ/APP/ADM configurable numbering + settings panel). Code PR kwiloai_webapp#1473.