School ERP comparison checklist

Make a table with one row per criterion and one column per vendor. Mark each as shown working, claimed but not shown, partly available or not available. Weight the rows that matter most to your school. We do not compare named products here; any fair comparison has to be done with your own requirements.

• Admissions with follow-ups and conversion to a student
• Student records with parents, documents and certificates
• Fees: structures, part payments, receipts, reminders, refunds, ledger
• Attendance for students and staff, with reports
• Exams, grading scheme, report cards
• Timetable with teacher and room views
• Homework and assignments
• Communication: notices, messages, events, meeting slots
• Transport, library, hostel, inventory
• HR and payroll
• Accounts and reports

• Roles for owner, principal, teacher, accountant, parent, student, driver and others
• Restricting a user to specific modules
• Audit log and sign-in history
• Two-factor sign-in and single sign-on

• Which platforms (Android, iOS)
• Separate apps by role, or one app for all
• Offline behaviour for attendance
• Parent fee payment inside the app
• Bus tracking for parents

• Whose gateway account receives fees
• UPI, card and net banking support
• How voids and refunds are recorded
• Invoices with GST if needed
• Export to your accounting tool

• Per-school data isolation
• Encryption of sensitive fields
• Import from spreadsheets with preview and undo
• Full export if you leave
• Backup and restore approach, and how the vendor describes it
• Handling of consent, export and erasure requests

• API and webhooks
• SMS, WhatsApp and email provider options and who pays
• Website builder or website integration

• Onboarding and import help
• Support channels and what is promised
• Release notes you can read (see our updates)
• Willingness to say what is not built
• Contract, renewal and exit terms

Use the same checklist on us. Our features, integrations and security pages describe what exists today. If a criterion is not met, we will say so in a demo.

Give every criterion a weight from one to three, where three means the school cannot do without it. For each vendor, score zero for not available, one for claimed but not shown, two for shown with limits and three for shown working with your data. Multiply by the weight and add up. The totals are not a verdict, but they show where the real gaps are, and they stop the discussion from being dominated by whoever gave the best presentation.

Keep a short note against any score of one or two. Those notes become the questions for your next meeting and, if you proceed, the items you want in writing.

1. Create a fee structure with three heads and assign it to a class.
2. Collect a part payment, print the receipt, then collect the balance.
3. Void the receipt and show how the correction is recorded.
4. Mark a class absent for one student and view the attendance report.
5. Create an exam, enter marks for five students and publish a report card.
6. Log an enquiry, follow it up and convert it into a student.
7. Send a notice to one class and show who has read it.
8. Import ten students from a spreadsheet with one deliberate error.
9. Sign in as a parent and as a teacher and show what each can and cannot see.

• Features shown only in slides or videos, never in the product
• Vague answers about where data is stored and who can see it
• No way to export your own data
• Claims of customer numbers, awards or uptime with no way to verify them
• Pressure to sign quickly
• Reluctance to say what the product does not do

Whichever product you choose, write down what was promised: modules, apps, support, onboarding help and price. Review it after the first term. Check the plan against what you actually use, and ask the vendor for its release notes so you can see whether the product is improving. Takshiva’s own changelog is on the updates page.

As a starting point, many schools give the highest weight to fee handling, student records, attendance and report cards, a middle weight to communication, transport and the parent app, and a lower weight to modules they will adopt later, such as inventory or the website builder. Your own weights may differ. A boarding school will weigh hostel more; a coaching institute will weigh batches and test results.

Write the weights down before you see any demos, so the presentations do not change what you think is important.

• Who will use this daily, and have they seen it?
• Which current process hurts most?
• What is our budget for the first year, including setup and messaging?
• Who will own the rollout?
• What would make us stop using the product after a year?

It is tempting to adjust scores after you have developed a favourite. Resist that. If you feel strongly about a vendor, ask which criterion explains the feeling and whether it deserves a higher weight. Share the table with the other people involved, such as the accountant and a senior teacher, and ask them to score separately. Where scores differ widely, discuss why. Often the difference is a feature one person tested and another did not.