Switching
Moving a school takes a week, or most of a term.
Your fee structure and your opening balances decide which. A single school starting at the top of a session, with master data in reasonable shape, can be live in a week. A trust moving several schools mid-session is closer to ten.
The timings below describe the longer end, because that is the one worth planning for. The migration is the real project. The software is the easy part.
What has to move
Seven things, and who in your school checks each one.
| What | Who checks it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Master data | Office | Classes, sections, sessions, subjects, departments, houses, document types. Over a thousand records ship as defaults. Yours replace or extend them. |
| Students and caregivers | Class teachers | Bulk import. Sibling links are detected during the import, which is usually where a school finds its own duplicates. |
| Staff | HR | Profiles, qualifications, documents, salary structures. |
| Fee structure | Accounts | Heads, charges, groups, plans, and the rules that decide who pays what. This is the step that takes longest and matters most. |
| Opening balances | Accountant and CA | Chart of accounts, opening balances, and the year’s transactions if you are moving mid-year. |
| Library catalogue | Librarian | Bulk book import with barcode generation. |
| Inventory | Store | Items, opening stock, and fixed assets with acquisition cost and useful life. |
The order it goes in
Six steps, and nothing useful happens out of order.
- Master data and structure · Two weeks
Classes, subjects, the shape of your school year. Nothing else can start until this is right.
- Students and staff · Two to three weeks
Mostly checking rather than importing. The import is quick. Verifying 1,400 student records against reality is not.
- Fee structure and rules · Three to four weeks
The longest step, because your fee rules have never been written down. They live in the head of the person who has been doing the billing. Getting them into rules is valuable work, and it is slow.
- Opening balances and accounts · Two weeks
With your CA. Best done at a financial year boundary. If you are moving mid-year, fee accounting entries for months already collected can be backfilled.
- Parallel run · One billing cycle
In both systems. This one is not optional. It is where you find the three fee cases nobody remembered.
- Cut over
The old system becomes read-only. It does not get switched off, and it does not get deleted.
Where you are coming from
Three routes in, and each has its own problem.
Moving from Tally
You do not have to leave Tally to start. Ledger and voucher-type mapping, XML export and a sync log mean your CA’s workflow continues while the school moves.
Several schools run the accounts in EduBold and export to Tally for a full year, until their auditor is willing to work directly in the new system. That is a reasonable way to do it, and it is not a failure of the migration.
Moving from spreadsheets
Faster in one sense and slower in another. There is less to import. But the rules that govern your fees have never been stated, because a spreadsheet lets you make an exception without recording that you made one.
Expect the fee-rule step to surface decisions nobody has made formally. That is the point of it.
Moving from another school ERP
This depends entirely on whether you can get your data out. Ask your current vendor for a full export in a readable format before you sign anything with us.
If they cannot or will not provide one, that is information about them, and it changes what this migration costs.
Who does what
We do the moving. You do the checking.
We do the import scripts, the structural setup, the fee rule configuration alongside your team, the training, and the parallel-run support.
You do the verification. Nobody outside your school can tell whether a student record is right, or whether the fee for a staff child in Class 4 is correct.
That checking is the work. It cannot be outsourced, and a migration that skips it fails in month three.
Next
Ask for the migration plan before you ask for the price.
A vendor who will not put a week-by-week plan in writing is telling you they have not thought about it.
Before any of this, there is a cheaper first step. Send a sample of your student data and the fee rules you actually apply. We will configure them and show you your own students billed correctly. It costs you an export, and it tells you more than any amount of reading.