Twelve questions to ask before you buy a school ERP
The demo will always look good. These are the questions that tell you what the system is actually like to live with in year two.
Every school ERP demos well. The data is clean, the presenter knows exactly which buttons to press, and nothing is ever slow.
You learn almost nothing from a demo. You learn a great deal from the answers to these.
About the data
1. Can I export everything, at any time, without asking you? If the answer involves raising a support ticket, your data is being held as a retention strategy. Walk away.
2. Who migrates our existing records, and how is the result verified? "You can import from Excel" is not an answer. Ask who does the work, and specifically whether they will reconcile imported totals against your registers before go-live.
3. What happens to our data if we leave? Get the answer in writing, in the contract, before you sign.
About the fit
4. Show me our fee structure configured in your system. Not a generic one — yours, with your concessions and instalments. If they can't do it during the sales process, they will struggle to do it during implementation.
5. Which examination boards ship as templates, and what does a new one cost? Result cards are where generic systems fail hardest. Ask specifically about your board.
6. Can a teacher mark attendance on a phone with two bars of signal? Then ask them to do it, on their phone, on mobile data, in front of you.
About the reality of running it
7. How long is training, and who delivers it? If the answer is a PDF and a video library, budget for the productivity loss.
8. What is your support channel, and what is the actual response time? In this region the honest answer is usually WhatsApp. A vendor who says "email, 48-hour SLA" has not worked with schools.
9. Who do we call at 8am on the first day of fee collection? A named person, or a queue? This question separates vendors sharply.
About the commercials
10. What is the total cost in year two? Year one is discounted almost everywhere. Year two is the real price. Ask for it explicitly.
11. What is charged as extra? SMS credits, additional campuses, extra user accounts, custom reports, the mobile app. Get the list.
12. Can I speak to a school that left you? Nobody asks this, and the answer is revealing regardless of what it is.
None of these questions are about features. Feature lists converge — most mature systems do broadly the same things. What differs is what happens when your data is messy, your connection is bad, and it is the first week of the term.
That is what you are actually buying.