A school ERP is a ten-year decision. Switching later means migrating fee ledgers, student histories and staff habits, so it pays to choose carefully. Having built and operated school systems for large school groups, this is the checklist we recommend to principals and trustees.
The 12 features
- Admissions pipeline: online enquiry form, registration, entrance test scheduling, document upload and enrolment in one flow, with follow-up reminders for the admissions desk.
- Fee management with online payment: fee structures by class and category, instalments, concessions, late fines, UPI / card / net-banking payment from the parent app and automatic receipts and reconciliation.
- Attendance: class-wise daily attendance, biometric or RFID options, and instant parent alerts for absence.
- Timetable and substitution: conflict-free timetable generation, teacher workload view and quick substitution when someone is on leave.
- Examinations and report cards: flexible grading schemes and ready CBSE, ICSE and state-board report card formats that you can still customise.
- Parent and teacher apps: homework, circulars, attendance, fees, results and chat with the class teacher; teachers mark attendance and upload marks from the phone.
- Communication: SMS, WhatsApp and app notifications with templates and delivery reports.
- Transport: routes, stops, driver details, GPS tracking and pickup alerts for parents.
- Library, hostel and inventory: often forgotten in demos, painful to add later.
- Staff and payroll link: staff records, leave and payroll, or a clean integration with an HRMS.
- Reports and dashboards: fee collection, defaulters, attendance trends, result analysis and management MIS without exporting to Excel.
- Security and backups: role-based access, audit trails, daily backups, data hosted in India and a clear exit clause that returns your data.
Questions to ask every vendor
- Can we see the system live in a school of our size, not just a demo account?
- Who owns the data and how do we export it if we leave?
- What is included in the annual fee: support hours, updates, SMS credits?
- How will you migrate our existing student, fee and ledger data?
- How many days of training do staff get, and is there a Hindi-speaking support line?
Migration without chaos
Go live at the start of a term, migrate master data first (students, staff, fee heads), run fee collection in parallel for one cycle, and nominate one coordinator per department. Our School Management System ships with a migration plan and on-site training for exactly this reason.