Every School ERP vendor's homepage looks similar: a list of modules, a few stock stats, and a "Book a Demo" button. That's exactly why the sales page is the wrong place to evaluate one. The questions below are the ones that actually separate a system that will run your school reliably for the next five years from one that looks fine in a 30-minute demo and causes problems in month four.
Ask these of any vendor you're considering — including us.
1Is our data actually isolated, or just access-controlled?
"Secure" is a word every vendor uses. The concrete question is: does your school's data live in its own database, or in a shared table with a school_id column filtering it? A shared-table design means a single query bug can leak one school's students into another's view. A genuinely multi-tenant system gives each school its own isolated database — ask the vendor to say which model they use, in those words.
2Whose payment gateway account does fee money go through?
If a vendor pools every school's online fee payments through one central account and settles it out to schools afterward, that pattern falls under RBI's Payment Aggregator regulations — a licensed category most software vendors aren't registered under. The correct model is each school connecting its own Razorpay (or equivalent) account, with funds settling directly to the school, not through the vendor. Ask directly: "whose merchant account receives the payment?"
3How is attendance actually verified — and can it be faked?
A basic "tap to mark present" button proves nothing. Ask whether attendance requires a live photo (not an uploaded one), whether it's checked against the school's real GPS coordinates, and whether staff check-ins are locked to an admin-approved device. Without device locking, anyone can install the same app on a second phone and check in remotely.
4What happens when someone makes an attendance mistake?
Mistakes happen — a teacher marks the wrong student, a student's phone fails to get GPS lock. Ask whether corrections go through a request-and-approval workflow with a record of who changed what, or whether admins can silently edit historical attendance with no trace. The second option undermines the entire point of having a secure attendance system.
5Are sensitive credentials encrypted, or just "in a protected database"?
Database passwords, payment gateway secrets, and API keys should be encrypted at rest (AES-256 or equivalent) — not stored as plain text protected only by server access controls. Ask specifically whether secrets are encrypted, and whether the encryption key itself is stored separately from the data it protects.
A useful follow-up question: "If your database were ever exposed, what would an attacker actually see?" A vendor with proper encryption will say "unreadable ciphertext for anything sensitive." A vendor without it will have to explain why that's supposedly not a problem.
6Does pricing include every module you're being shown in the demo?
Some ERPs demo a full feature set and then bill per-module once you're onboarded. Ask for the exact plan tier your school qualifies for and get, in writing, which modules from the demo are actually included at that price — not "available as an add-on."
7Who does the data migration, and what's the actual timeline?
Moving from Excel sheets or another system means importing existing students, staff, and fee history. Ask who does this work — you, or the vendor — and get a specific number of days, not "quickly" or "soon."
8Does every role actually get a dedicated view, or is it one dashboard with permissions?
A teacher, a parent, and an accountant need fundamentally different screens, not the same dashboard with some buttons hidden. Ask to see the parent view and the accounts view specifically during the demo — not just the admin dashboard, which is what most demos default to.
9What does support actually look like after the contract is signed?
"24/7 support" printed on a pricing page and a real response time are different things. Ask what channel support comes through (phone, email, ticket system), what the actual response time commitment is, and whether it changes during high-load periods like exam season or fee deadlines — which is exactly when something going wrong matters most.
10Can you talk to an existing school using it, unprompted?
Case studies and testimonials on a website are curated. A short call with a real school administrator — even 10 minutes — tells you more about day-to-day reliability than any feature list. Any vendor confident in their product should be able to arrange this without much friction.
The pattern behind all ten questions
Notice that none of these are about how many modules a platform has. Module counts are easy to pad and hard to verify from a demo. What's harder to fake — and what actually determines whether your school has a smooth year or a stressful one — is how the system behaves under real conditions: mistakes, edge cases, payment failures, and busy periods. Ask about those specifically, for any vendor you're evaluating.
Ask Us These Questions Directly
We'll answer all ten on the call — no generic slides, no dodging the specifics.
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