Feature lists are useless for comparing school ERPs because every vendor ticks every box. A more useful question: which capabilities are painful or impossible to add after you have committed?
These are the ones.
Behaviour when the internet is down
A cloud system is unavailable when connectivity is. In many Indian schools that is not rare, and it matters most at the moments that matter most — fee collection day, admission season, result publication.
Ask two separate questions, because a vendor answering yes to the first may still fail the second:
- Can staff keep working — issuing receipts, entering records — while the connection is down?
- Does that work reach the live server by itself when the connection returns, or does somebody re-type it?
A system that caches locally but needs manual re-entry afterwards has moved the problem rather than solved it, and the re-entry happens on a day already disrupted.
Ours keeps working offline and syncs to the live server once connectivity is back. We built it that way because in several states a bad line is an ordinary week, not an incident.
This is architectural. It cannot be added afterwards, which is why it belongs on a list of things to settle before signing rather than something to raise later.
A parent app that works on the phones your parents actually have
Not the latest handset on good connectivity — an entry-level Android on a weak connection. Insist on a demo under those conditions.
Also check:
- A parent with two or three children seeing all of them without logging out
- Languages your parent base actually reads
- Whether the app is usable for a parent who is not confident with smartphones — the number of taps to see a fee receipt is a reasonable proxy
Adoption is the whole value of the parent module. An app that only works well for the most digitally comfortable third of your parents solves the problem for the third who were never the problem.
Online fee payment you can actually reconcile
Accepting payment online is easy. Reconciling it is where systems differ:
- Does the receipt generate automatically on successful payment, or does someone post it manually?
- What happens when a payment succeeds at the gateway but fails to register — is there an automatic reconciliation, or does the parent call the office?
- Can a partial payment be allocated across fee heads by a rule rather than by hand?
- Does settlement reporting match the bank statement in a form accounts can tie out?
The failed-but-debited case is the one that generates angry calls. Ask how it is handled before you buy, not during your first collection cycle.
Multi-branch, if there is any chance you will grow
Even a single-campus school may add a branch or a pre-primary wing. Retrofitting multi-branch onto a single-tenant deployment usually means a second instance and manual consolidation.
Ask whether branches share a student master, whether a student can transfer between branches retaining history, and whether consolidated reporting exists. Cheap to have from the start, expensive to add.
Role-based access with a real audit trail
Who can waive a late fee, edit a mark after publication, change a student's fee category, delete a receipt? Each should be restricted and each should be logged with a username and timestamp.
This is not about distrust. It is about being able to answer a question six months later when a parent disputes something, and about protecting staff from accusations.
A copy of your data that does not depend on the vendor
Export on request is the common offer, and it has a flaw: it works only while the vendor is cooperating. In a payment dispute, or with a provider who has stopped responding, a school with no copy outside the platform has no records at all.
What to insist on instead is automatic: a scheduled export that arrives somewhere the school controls — its own email or storage — without anyone requesting it. Then the question of vendor cooperation never arises.
Also ask what happens to access if an invoice goes unpaid. A vendor willing to state a policy in writing — read-only rather than switched off, for instance — is a different proposition from one who keeps the option of cutting you off unstated.
These are reasonable questions about records concerning children. Discomfort answering them is itself the answer.
Board-specific reporting, demonstrated
Ask to see a report card generated in your board's current prescribed format. Not described — generated, on screen.
The gap between "supported" and "produces the correct format without manual reformatting" is a term's worth of work every term.
About the author. Kislay Chandan has worked with schools since 2014. Rather than gathering requirements from the outside, he worked inside a school to see what actually goes wrong day to day, and built what he found into the software. He still works with Shemrock Glitters in Patna — most changes to the product start with something that came up there.
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