Frequently asked questions

You do, and we make that structural rather than a promise. A copy of your data is sent automatically to your own email on a schedule you set, so it sits on infrastructure we do not control. If our relationship ended tomorrow, your records would still be in your inbox.

This matters because the common arrangement — a vendor holding the only copy and exporting it on request — offers no protection in the situation it exists for. In a dispute, or with a vendor who has stopped responding, a copy that requires their cooperation is worth nothing.

The software keeps working. After three or four payment reminders it moves to read-only: new entries pause, and everything else stays exactly as it was — admission records, fee history, student data, all visible and exportable.

We do not switch schools off. Cutting access does not make an invoice get paid any faster; it creates an emergency for parents at the counter and front desk staff who had nothing to do with it.

As often as you choose — hourly, daily, or another interval — and it goes to your own email automatically, with no request needed. Daily is the sensible minimum for any school collecting fees, since a day of receipts is a day of counter work nobody wants to reconstruct.

A school taking fees all day has different needs from a small pre-primary, which is why the schedule is yours to set rather than one we picked.

Two different answers, because they cover two different risks. On our servers we keep the last seven and replace the oldest automatically — an operational window, enough to undo a bad import or recover something deleted last week.

The copies in your own mailbox have no expiry at all. They stay until you delete them, and nobody else can. That is the difference between a vendor's retention policy and genuinely holding your own records.

On our own infrastructure rather than resold space, and we take a daily offline copy as a precaution — one that is not reachable over the network at all.

That last detail is deliberate. A backup sitting online shares the fate of whatever compromises the system it is attached to, which is exactly why ransomware looks for backups first. Schools hold a great deal of personal information about children, and where it sits is a fair question to ask any vendor before price is discussed.

Yes, and we have seen it. A school of around 400 students had its ERP blocked and believed years of admissions and fee records were gone.

They were lucky in one respect: their system was installed on a machine in their own office, so the software was locked but the data was still physically on the premises and could be extracted. Had it been a cloud system with the records on the vendor's server, there would have been nothing on site to recover. That is the whole argument for an automatic off-site backup — it removes the luck.

Work continues. The software keeps running offline, and once the connection returns it syncs to the live server on its own — nothing is re-typed.

We built it this way because in several states a poor line is an ordinary week rather than an incident. When comparing vendors, ask two separate questions: can staff keep working while the line is down, and does that work reach the server by itself afterwards? A system that caches locally but needs manual re-entry has moved the problem to a day that is already disrupted.

It is a data capture project rather than a migration, and the method matters more than the software. We send an Excel template containing only the fields fees and admissions actually need — a format your office already understands, and one several people can fill in at once.

Once that is loaded, students complete the rest from their own panel: addresses, contact details, the fields a clerk would otherwise copy from a register. This takes the remaining work off the office entirely, and the data comes out more accurate, because the person entering a phone number is the one who knows it.

Usually not, and it works. We have never met most of our school clients in person — Naval Academy in Kushinagar, Glitters Kids in Patna, and Jonaki Jatio Bidyalaya in Dhubri, Assam, the last running for eight years without a site visit.

Three states, no travel. The Excel template works because the office already understands spreadsheets, students completing their own records needs no supervision, and answering the phone quickly means nobody has to be in the room. For a school outside a metro, distance is not a reason to accept a worse vendor.

Between seven and thirty days, in our experience, and the software being easy makes less difference than people expect.

The variable is habit rather than complexity. A clerk who has issued receipts from a register for eleven years is not slow because the screen confuses them — under a queue, they revert to what they know. Expect the first fortnight to be slower than the paper process it replaces, and do not schedule go-live against a deadline that assumes otherwise.

Mid-session is fine, provided the cutover lands on a fee instalment boundary rather than an arbitrary date. Collect one full instalment in the old arrangement, close and reconcile it, then start the next instalment in the new system.

Cutting over mid-instalment leaves part-paid students in two places, and every receipt afterwards needs someone to decide which balance is true. That single decision causes more difficulty than everything else in a migration combined.

Fees, alone, for one full collection cycle. It has the clearest value, the fastest payback and the smallest number of people to train.

Switching on admissions, fees, attendance, exams, transport and payroll in the same week is the most reliable way to fail. Everyone is learning at once, every complaint reaches the same two people, and nothing stays stable long enough to fix. Once one cycle has run end to end, staff believe the system works — and that belief is what carries the next module.

Yes — CBSE, UP, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and others. Fee structure works the same way across boards, which is why one product serves all of them, and why a vendor charging a premium for "board-specific" fee handling is charging for something that is not there.

No. The session start date is set per school, and everything downstream follows it.

This is worth checking with any vendor, because it is not a display setting. CBSE schools start in April, Maharashtra in June, Kashmir in September, and the session start determines when the academic year rolls over, when promotion and roll number regeneration run, when the fee cycle begins and which year arrears belong to. A system that assumes April will be wrong about all of it for a Maharashtra school, and wrong by nearly half a year for one in Kashmir.

Yes, and these are configured per school rather than worked around. A sibling concession, for instance, requires the system to know that two students share a parent, know which was admitted first, and apply the discount to the right one automatically — not leave it to a clerk remembering.

We also configure different fee structures for different categories of student within the same school, which is normal rather than exceptional. When evaluating any vendor, bring your most awkward fee rule to the demo and ask them to build it in front of you. "That can be customised" means a development request you will pay for later.

From 7am during school hours, for the first few months after go-live.

Schools open at 7 and most software companies open at 10, which covers none of the morning fee counter, the admission enquiries or attendance marking. A problem at 7:15 answered at 10:30 has already ruined a morning. It is not a complicated commitment — it is simply one that almost nobody makes, and it is worth asking any vendor directly what time they answer the phone.

Yes, and we expect to. Almost every implementation involves changing something, because India is not a single market and schools do not run the same way.

Most of it concentrates in fees, where the rules a school has built up over years have to be modelled rather than approximated. A system covering ninety per cent of your fee structure means ten per cent of receipts stay manual, and manual receipts are where reconciliation breaks.

Directors receive a daily report by email automatically — collections, arrears and admissions — without anyone requesting it.

Two reasons that matters more than it sounds. Management sees the current position daily rather than asking for a report and waiting. And it is a second continuous record of the school's own numbers, arriving somewhere the school controls.