Belts are a record, not a rule

The requirement exists for a reason that has nothing to do with software. It stops the conversation where one parent asks why another child got a stripe first, and it gives a child something countable to aim at. Both of those are worth having.

The trouble starts when the tool that holds the count starts holding the decision.

The child who was ill in March

Here is the case that breaks every rule-enforcing system. A child misses five weeks with a broken wrist, comes back, and is plainly better than half the group. The count says no.

The instructor knows the answer. If the software will not let him award the belt, he will award it anyway — on paper, or in his head, or by asking you to change a number. From that moment the record in the software is wrong, and it stays wrong, and nobody trusts it again.

A tool that gets overruled once gets ignored afterwards.

Suggest, and then get out of the way

The useful thing software can do here is produce the list: these eleven children now meet what you wrote down, and here is when each last graded. That list is genuinely valuable, because without it a school opens each child's record one at a time and therefore does it once a quarter.

A late grading is one of the more common reasons a child stops coming. Producing the list is the whole contribution; deciding is not.

Count from the last grading, not from enrollment

A small detail that matters the first time you use it. If you count all classes ever attended, a child with two years behind them qualifies for every level at once on the day you set the requirements up.

Count since the last award. It is the only version that describes what the requirement is actually about.

Store the number you saw

When a belt is awarded, write down the count as it stood that day. Attendance records get corrected afterwards — someone was marked absent who was there — and without a snapshot, a school that fixes one Tuesday in April finds itself with a belt that no longer looks earned.

Names are yours

Belts, stripes, kyu, geup, grades, levels, books. Every school has its own and a fair number have one nobody else uses. Software should have no opinion about this whatsoever, and any list of belt names shipped in a product is a list for one style.