Education Operations Automation Platform for Edugrid
Turning a month-long manual paper trail — test books, workbooks and timesheets — into a same-cycle automated pipeline, across 7 branches.
Client: Edugrid, South Africa. Built, supported and maintained by Auto Core System.
The system in four numbers.
Client: Edugrid, a multi-branch education provider based in South Africa. Auto Core System designed, built, and continues to support and maintain this platform.
Teachers, assessors and admin used to touch every record by hand. Now they upload, and review at the end.
Edugrid, a multi-branch education provider operating across 7 branches and 15+ course types, was losing over a month of staff time every cycle to a fully manual process: teachers photographing test books and workbooks, assessors reading each file by eye to record marks, and admin staff manually renaming and filing everything into Drive. A separate manual process required staff to read paper timesheets and re-key attendance into a slow, unreliable CRM.
We designed and built a connected suite of 10+ automations — spanning document intake, OCR extraction, assessor review, resubmission handling, and timesheet-to-CRM sync — that replaced the entire manual process end to end. The suite is built as a dynamic system, not a set of one-off scripts: new document types, course types, or branches can be onboarded through configuration rather than rebuilding an automation from scratch.
This wasn’t a small tool bolted onto the existing process — it’s a shift in how the entire organisation operates day to day. Every manual step that used to sit between a teacher’s photo and a completed, approved record has been absorbed into the automation. Staff now have exactly two touchpoints: upload, and review at the end of the cycle.
A single processing cycle took a month or longer.
- Manual uploads, no structure. Teachers were manually uploading and naming test books and workbooks across 7 branches and 15+ course types, with no consistent structure.
- Manual grading review. Assessors had to open every file, read student details and marks by eye, and fill in a Jotform submission by hand — slow and error-prone at scale.
- No structured feedback loop. There was no way to flag problems (wrong marks, blurry images, missing pages) back to teachers, so corrections happened over email or in person, adding days of delay.
- A separate timesheet bottleneck. Admin staff read physical timesheets for every staff member and manually entered attendance into a CRM already known for being slow — with records regularly missed.
From upload to approved record, without a manual step in between.
10+ connected automations, not one monolithic workflow.
- Test Book Submission & OCR — extracts marks, student ID, name, course and subject, then files automatically.
- Workbook Submission & OCR — the same extraction pipeline without a marks field, logging to the dedicated workbook sheet.
- Assessor Approve Workflow — marks a submission complete and syncs the outcome back to the teacher-facing sheet in real time.
- Assessor Deny Workflow — captures the reason code and reflects it back so a corrected file can be resubmitted immediately.
- Document Portal Submission — handles submissions through Edugrid’s document portal, routing each to the correct downstream process.
- ID / CV / Affidavit Upload — processes these through their own dedicated intake and filing pipeline.
- Post-Interview Document Upload — manages uploads after a candidate interview, kept separate from general submissions.
- Timesheet Upload — ingests staff timesheets in batch and hands them to OCR for attendance extraction.
- Timesheet-to-CRM Sync — pushes the extracted attendance records directly into the CRM via API.
- Resubmission & Correction Loop — detects a disapproved submission, re-opens the record, and re-triggers the full cycle on corrected upload.
- Dynamic Routing Layer — reads document type, course and branch on intake and routes to the correct automation and sheet. New branches or document types are added through configuration, not a rebuild.
This list reflects the core automations in production; the suite continues to expand as Edugrid onboards new document types and workflows.
What changed.
| Metric | Before | After |
| Processing time per cycle | 1+ month | Days, not weeks |
| File renaming & filing | Fully manual | Fully automated |
| Assessor review | Manual form-fill per file (Jotform) | In-app approve / disapprove with reason |
| Timesheet → CRM entry | Manual, slow, records often missed | OCR + API sync, same-day |
| Branches supported | — | 7 |
| Course types supported | — | 15+ |
Both systems remain in active production across all 7 branches, with Auto Core System providing ongoing support and maintenance.
What it’s built on.
| Orchestration | n8n |
| OCR engine | Mistral OCR |
| Document storage & trigger | Google Drive API |
| Tracking sheets | Google Sheets API |
| Assessor review | Custom web application (assessor portal) |
| Attendance sync | CRM REST API |
Live at edugridhub.com