Almost everything that goes wrong with a school ERP is decided before anything is installed — in a meeting where the questions asked were about features and the questions that mattered were about everything else. Here are the nine we wish every institution put to us, including the ones that are uncomfortable for a vendor to answer honestly.
1. Who actually wrote this software?
There is a real difference between a company that built the platform and a company that resells someone else’s. Both can give you a good demo. Only one can fix a bug, add a report or change a workflow without going back to a third party and waiting.
Ask directly: if we need a change, who writes it, and what is the path from us asking to it being live? A reseller will answer in terms of raising a request. A builder will answer in terms of a developer. Neither is disqualifying — but it tells you what your next three years look like.
2. What happens to our data if we leave?
Ask this in the first meeting, not the last. The answer you want is specific: what format, how long it takes, what it costs, and whether it includes the things that are painful to reconstruct — historical marks, fee ledgers, receipts, uploaded documents.
“Of course you can have your data” is not an answer. A vendor that has thought about it will tell you the format without being pushed. A vendor that has not is telling you something too.
3. Who is the person we call at 8 a.m. on a report card day?
Support is not a feature list item; it is the product. Every institution finds this out on the same kind of morning — results are due, something is not printing, and three hundred parents are expecting a report card.
So ask about that morning specifically. Is there a phone number, or only a portal? What are the hours, in your timezone? Is the person who answers able to look at your account, or do they take a message? Have they seen your school’s setup before? Ask for a reference from an institution of about your size and ask them.
4. What does it cost in year three?
First-year pricing is the easy part, and it is often quoted keenly. The questions that decide your actual cost are about later:
- Is the price per student, per module, per login, or some combination?
- What happens when your strength grows by two hundred?
- Are new features included, or do they arrive as a higher tier?
- Is there a charge for the annual roll-over into a new academic session?
- What is billed separately — SMS credits, payment gateway charges, hardware, on-site visits, training a new batch of teachers?
None of these are unreasonable to charge for. All of them are unpleasant to discover in year two.
5. Can it produce our report card?
This is the question that most often derails a rollout, because a report card is not a report — it is a document with a school’s particular grading scheme, weightings, remarks, co-scholastic sections, signatures and layout, and often a board’s prescribed format on top.
Do not accept a demo of a generic report card. Send your actual blank report card before you sign, and ask them to show it produced from the system. If the answer is “that can be customised”, ask what customisation costs and how long it takes — and get the answer before the contract, not after.
6. What does the teacher’s screen look like?
Sales demos are given from the administrator’s login, where everything looks powerful. But an ERP lives or dies on the class teacher who has to mark attendance between periods with thirty seconds and one hand free.
Ask to see attendance taken, and marks entered, from a phone, by someone who is not from the vendor. If it takes more than a few taps, teachers will do it on paper and give it to the office later — and you will have bought an expensive way to keep doing what you already do.
7. Where does the data live, and who can reach it?
You are holding personal data about children. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the institution is the Data Fiduciary — the responsibility is yours, and the software vendor is processing on your instruction.
Ask where it is hosted, whether it is encrypted in transit, how often it is backed up, how one institution is kept separate from another, and whether the vendor will sign a data processing agreement. Ask whether their staff can see your records and under what circumstances. A vendor who finds these questions annoying is answering them.
We have written out our own answers on our security page, partly so that institutions can use it as a checklist against anyone else’s.
8. How does our existing data get in?
Migration is where rollouts stall. Your records are in a mix of spreadsheets, registers, an old system’s export and somebody’s personal file. That is normal — but who is doing the work of getting it in?
Establish whether migration is included or billed, what shape they need your data in, who checks it, and what happens to records that do not fit. Then ask the question underneath it: how long from signing to us actually working in this thing? A vendor who says two weeks for a full school has not done it.
9. Which institutions have left, and why?
Every vendor has reference customers ready. Far more revealing is asking about the ones who left. A straight answer — a school that outgrew the product, one that could not get the board format they needed, one where a change of management brought a change of vendor — tells you a lot about both the product and the honesty of the people selling it.
An answer of “nobody has ever left” is not credible from anyone who has been running more than a couple of years.
The one that is not on the list
You will notice none of these questions is “how many features does it have?” Every ERP in this market has more modules than any single institution will use. Feature count is the easiest thing to compare and the least likely to determine whether this works for you.
What determines that is whether the software fits how your institution actually runs, whether the people using it daily find it faster than paper, and whether somebody answers the phone in March.