School and university admission documents, scanned right

Admission season is a document gauntlet — often for multiple children across multiple portals with different rules. One well-organised scanning weekend defuses the whole thing.

The usual asks

• Birth certificate (old-paper technique)
• Previous report cards/transcripts — every page, grades legible
• Transfer/leaving certificates with stamps and signatures
• Immunisation records
• Parent IDs and address proof (utility-bill guide)
• Passport-size photo — usually uploaded as an image per spec, not a PDF; check each portal

Per-child folders, portal-ready names

1. Admissions/{Child}/2026 as the folder.
2. Scan the stack in one ToPDF session; multi-page records become single PDFs.
3. Name for the checklist: “Birth-Certificate-Ali.pdf”, “ReportCard-Grade5-Ali.pdf”.
4. Reuse across schools — only the upload order changes.

Deadline-day sanity

Portals crash on deadline evenings everywhere in the world. Having every file scanned, named and size-checked days early converts the crash from crisis to inconvenience. Scans also can't be forgotten in the other bag on interview day — keep the folder on your phone.

Frequently asked questions

The school wants originals at verification — why scan at all?

Scans drive the application/upload stage and your records; originals appear once at verification. Both stages get easier when the digital set is complete.

Photos of the child as PDF or JPEG?

Follow the portal: photo fields nearly always want JPEG at set dimensions; document fields want PDFs. Keep the photo file separate from the document scans.