Buyer's guide
How to choose a school ERP without regretting it a year later
Most ERP regret is bought in the demo. A demo is a rehearsed path through the happy case, run by someone who knows the software, on data that was prepared for it. This guide replaces the demo with a process: what to shortlist on, which questions expose depth, how to design a trial week that uses your own data, and what to fix in the contract before you sign.
Start from the week, not the feature list
Every ERP's feature list says admissions, fees, attendance, exams and communication. The list cannot separate them because the words are the same. What separates them is a week in your office: the Monday fee counter, the Wednesday absentee calls, the Friday marks entry, the month-end reconciliation. Write down your five heaviest recurring tasks, with who does them and how long they take, before you look at a single product.
- Name the five tasks that eat the most office hours in a normal month
- For each, record who does it, how long it takes and what it depends on
- Mark the two that break during admissions season and fee week
- Those two decide the purchase; everything else is a tie-breaker
Shortlist on four things you can verify before a demo
You can eliminate most of a shortlist from a vendor's own website, in an afternoon, without a sales call. Each of these is either published or it is not, and a vendor who will not publish it is telling you something.
- Published pricing. If the price is quote-only, you cannot compare and you cannot budget. A per-learner monthly figure also tells you whether you are being priced as a school or as an enterprise project.
- Setup time, stated as a number. 'Quick onboarding' is not a number. Ask for the date you would mark your first attendance.
- Whether the ERP and the LMS are one system or two. If a test taken in the LMS does not reach the report card without re-entry, you own two systems and the integration.
- Whose name families see. Your domain and logo, or the vendor's app name. This decides whether the software builds your institute's standing or the vendor's.
The questions that expose a weak ERP
Ask these in the demo, and ask to see the answer on screen rather than hear it. A strong product answers each one in under a minute; a weak one changes the subject to a roadmap.
- Show me a learner admitted mid-year, with a concession on tuition and a transport fee added, and then show me the resulting fee ledger.
- Mark one period of attendance for a class of 60, and show me what the family receives and when.
- Enter marks for one subject under our marking scheme, then show me the report card it produces, unedited.
- Show me a learner who left in March and what happens to their records, their dues and their documents.
- Show me the same figure — total collected this month — in three places, and explain any difference.
- Export everything we have entered, now, in a format we can read without your software.
Design the trial week around your own data
A trial on sample data proves nothing: sample data has no history, no exceptions and no leavers. Import one real class, with its real fee structure and its real messiness, and run one real week. Give it to the people who will actually use it — the clerk and the class teacher, not the principal — and ask them at the end of the week whether they would go back.
- One real class, real learners, real fee heads, real concessions
- The clerk does a fee day; the class teacher does five days of attendance
- Run one assessment end to end, from marks entry to a printed report card
- Count the times somebody had to ask the vendor how to do something
- At the end, ask both users the same question: go back, or keep this?
Fix these in writing before you sign
The terms that hurt are the ones nobody discusses during a happy purchase. All five are reasonable to ask for and cheap for a confident vendor to grant.
- Data export: format, scope and how long it takes, in the contract
- Price escalation at renewal, capped as a percentage
- What happens to your data if you stop paying, and for how long
- Who owns the subdomain and what happens to it if you leave
- Support response times, and whether migration help is included or billed
Everything in one place
What the platform covers
Published plans
Every tier and its learner limit is on the pricing page. You can budget before you talk to anyone.
One system, not two
Courses, tests and results share the learner record that holds fees and attendance, so marks reach a report card without re-entry.
Your name on it
Your domain and logo across the portal and every message a family receives.
Questions, answered
Frequently asked questions
How long should choosing a school ERP take?
Two to four weeks is enough for a single school: a week to write down your heaviest tasks and shortlist on published information, a week of demos with the questions above, and one real trial week. Longer than that is usually a sign the decision has no owner rather than a sign of diligence.
Should we buy modules we do not need yet?
No. Buy for the five tasks that hurt now. An unused module costs nothing to switch on later in a cloud system, and paying for hostel, transport and payroll you do not run is how a school ends up on an enterprise tier it cannot justify.
Who should decide — the principal, the office or the trust?
The trust approves the spend, but the people who will use it daily should hold the veto. An ERP the clerk and the class teacher resent is abandoned within a term, whatever it cost, and the school goes back to registers with a licence still running.
What is the most common mistake?
Choosing on module count. A hundred modules nobody can operate is worse than twelve that the office actually uses, because the depth you paid for shows up as screens your staff have to learn their way around.
Do families need to install an app to receive this?
No. Classfold has no parent app and no parent login. Notices, fee dues, attendance alerts and results go to families over WhatsApp, SMS and email under your institute's own name, so there is nothing for them to download or remember a password for.
What does Classfold cost?
Plans are published in full and priced by learner count, starting at ₹180/month for up to 90 learners. There is no implementation fee and no quote-only tier except the custom one for very large networks. See the pricing page.