"How is my son doing?" is the question every coach hears at the gate. Monthly reports give you a better answer than "fine, he's improving". Once a month you rate each student on the things your academy cares about, and the parent gets a report with attendance, ratings, match stats and your notes. This guide covers setting it up, rating a batch, sending, and what the parent sees.

What a Report Holds

Each student gets one report per calendar month. It carries:

• Attendance for the month, session by session.
• Your ratings on each measure, with the last few months beside them so progress is visible.
• Match stats from cricket scored on Skipper.
• Your Coach Notes and Recommendations, and your signature.

A sent report is final. If you spot a mistake afterwards, the correction goes into next month's report. Parents can read old reports for as long as the student is still part of the academy.

1. Set Up Player Roles (Optional)

Roles say what a player does, like batter, bowler or wicket keeper. They show beside the student's name on the report, and a template can be aimed at a role so that your bowlers get bowling measures and your batters get batting ones.

• Open your academy, go to the More tab and tap Player roles.
• For your sport, tap Start from preset for the usual roles, or Add role to write your own.
• To give a student a role, open their profile and find Player roles. Tap Add (or Edit) and pick. A student can hold more than one.

A student with no role simply gets the general templates.

2. Build Your Templates

A template is the checklist you rate every student on. Owners, admins and head coaches set these up.

• Go to More and tap Report templates.
• Starting from nothing? Tap Start with the cricket set. It gives you psychological, technical, tactical and physical templates, and you can edit anything afterwards. Later, the + in the header offers New template or Add from the cricket set.
• Name the template, like Batting skills.
• Aim it. For sport narrows it to one sport, For levels to beginner, intermediate or advanced, and For roles to the roles you made. Pick none and it applies to every student.
• Tap Add measure for each thing you will rate.

A measure has a name and a type:

• Rating is a score from 1 to 5. Tap Add a scoring guide to write what a 1, a 3 and a 5 looks like, so two coaches mean the same thing by a 4.
• Number is a value with a unit, like reps or centimetres.
• Time is for things like a sprint.
• Text is a short note per student, with no number and no trend.

For numbers and times, switch on Lower is better when a drop counts as improvement, like a sprint time. Tap Save template when you are done.

A student gets every template that matches their batch level and their role, so keep one general template and add specific ones on top. Changes apply from next month. Reports already created keep the measures they were rated on. To stop using a template, switch it off from the list. You can switch it back on any time.

3. Rate a Batch

• Open the batch. On its Home tab, the month's ratings row (for example October ratings) has a Rate button. The Performance tab does the same job with Start rating or Continue rating, and shows the month so far and past months.
• A sheet asks how you want to work. By measure takes one skill across the whole batch, which is the fastest way to do 1 to 5 ratings. By student finishes one student, notes included, then moves to the next.
• Last month's values can save you time. The sheet also has a Start from switch named after last month, for example Start from September. Switch it on and every blank measure is filled with that student's sent value from last month. Then you only change what moved. Coach Notes and Recommendations are never copied.

Coaches see only the batches they are assigned to.

By measure

You see one measure at a time with every student listed under it. Tap a number from 1 to 5 for each student, or type a number or time. Last month's rating shows as a small dot under the number, so you can see who moved. If a measure does not apply to a student, tap N/A.

• Same as Sept (it shows last month's name) copies last month's value for everyone you have not rated yet.
• Next measure moves on. On the last measure the button reads Review & send.
• Your work saves as you go, so a phone call mid-batch costs you nothing.
• The switch at the top flips between By measure and By student whenever you like.

By student

One student per screen, with all their measures, then Coach Notes ("how the month went, in a few lines") and Recommendations ("what to work on next"). Save, next student moves along, and the last student's button reads Save and finish. Preview PDF shows how the report will look.

4. Review, Sign and Send

From the last measure, or from Review & send on the batch (it appears once something is ready to go), you land on the review screen, headed with the month and the batch. It lists every student with a line saying how far along they are, and a summary at the top says how many are ready to send.

• Your signature. Tap Draw signature, sign with your finger, and tap Save. You do this once. It is stamped on every report you send, with a blank line left for the parent to sign too.
• Send to parents by. Choose WhatsApp, the Skipper app, or both. WhatsApp needs to be switched on for your academy first. In More → Academy details there is a Performance reports switch under Messaging.
• Tap Sign and send, which shows how many reports are going. Skipper asks you to confirm, because sent reports are final.

Some reports may still be missing ratings. They are left out unless you choose Send anyway. If you used last month's values and did not change them for some students, Skipper asks first ("Some reports are unchanged"), so a copied rating does not go out by accident.

No signature yet? Send unsigned works, but you cannot add the signature afterwards. And if you would rather sign on paper, Download PDFs to print and sign makes one PDF of the reports, with a blank line for your pen.

Back on the batch, the month shows how many reports are sent and how many parents have marked theirs as read.

What Parents See

• A notification in the app, and if you chose WhatsApp, a message with a link that opens the report in the browser. Parents who never installed Skipper can still read it.
• In the app, the Progress tab of the academy. They pick the month, read the report, tap Mark as read, and tap Download PDF to keep a copy.

There is a parent's view of all this in Your Child's Academy, on Your Phone.

Tips That Save Time

• Start with few measures. Eight good ones you rate every month beat thirty you skip.
• Use By measure for ratings and By student for the notes.
• Write the scoring guide once. It is the difference between your ratings and your co-coach's.