Every school management product has admissions, fees, attendance, a timetable and report cards. Put four brochures side by side and the lists are nearly identical. That is why feature lists are a poor way to choose, and why a walkthrough of the vendor’s own sample data is worth less than it looks.
These are questions that get different answers from different vendors.
Ask them to bill your students, not theirs
Send a sample of your student data and the fee rules you actually apply, including the awkward ones you assume no software handles. Ask to see your own students billed correctly before you commit to anything.
A vendor who agrees is telling you the product can be described to. A vendor who offers you another walkthrough of their own sample data is telling you something too.
Ask what happens when a receipt is cancelled
Then ask when it happens in the ledger. If the answer is an export, a sync, a nightly job or a person, your fee report and your accounts will disagree every month, and finding out why will be somebody’s job.
Ask which of your states’ rules it knows
Professional tax slabs differ by state. If you have branches in two states, ask to see both. Ask whether ESI eligibility is recalculated when somebody’s pay crosses the ceiling mid-year, or whether the office is expected to maintain that list.
Ask what a leave without pay does on its own
Trace one event all the way through. A teacher is absent for two days and it is unpaid. Does that reach payroll without anybody typing it again? Does the reduced gross change the ESI position? Does the change reach the ledger?
If any link in that chain is a person carrying a figure from one screen to another, that is where your month will go.
Ask who owns the data and how you get it out
Ask for the export before you need it. Ask what happens to your records if you leave. A vendor who cannot answer that quickly has not thought about it, and you will be the one who finds out.
Ask what it cannot do
This is the most useful question on the list, and the answer tells you more than anything else in the meeting. Every product has edges. A vendor who names theirs is describing a real product. A vendor who says the software handles everything is describing a brochure.
Ask to talk to the person who will configure it
The demo is given by somebody who is good at demos. The setup is done by somebody else. Ask who that is, how long it takes, and what they need from your office before they start.
The gap between the demo and the first live month is where most school software projects are actually decided.