Best School Management Software in 2024

What is School Management Software?

School management software is an automation technology that helps schools, colleges, and other educational institutes manage both academic and administrative activities digitally. With the best school management system, processes like classroom management, faculty management, examination management, parent-teacher interaction, admission, fee collection, student information, etc. can be streamlined. School ERP software is ideal for modern-day educational institutes to optimize their resources and manage all student-related data through a single platform. 

How School Management Software Works?

Top school management systems help education institutes digitize a lot of their functions and better manage the different verticals of a school’s operation. Tasks like student registration, admission management, library, and hostel management, setting timetable and schedules, designating faculty to classes, etc, can be performed with school management software.

Common School Management Software Functionalities

• Student Information Management
• Teachers’ Management
• Separate Logins for Parents, Teachers, Students & Admin Staff
• Report Card Management 
• Assignment Management
• Attendance Management
• Examination Management

As time goes and your student & faculty size grows, you can scale up your college ERP or school ERP software to stay relevant with the increase in operation size. School software when integrated with campus management can help in reducing cost overhead, as a lot of processes are automated and can be managed by a smaller team of people.

Most school management software in India is mobile-enabled, so you can access your school’s data on the go. Be it a smartphone or a tablet, you are always connected to your data even when you’re not physically inside the school. 

What is School ERP: School ERP Vs School Management Software

School ERP software stands for “School Enterprise Resource Planning Software”. Education ERP software helps with the business aspect of schools and colleges. School ERP software consists of a bundle of applications or tools that helps the school admin staff and teachers access data through a single platform. It helps streamline all the tasks needed for an educational institution to run effortlessly.

School ERPs are used to make the process for managing student data and providing them knowledge with the help of technology. It helps track student’s attendance, conduct exams, manage co-curricular activities, teachers’ class schedule, etc. School management system also helps the admin staff to maintain official records for employee attendance, fiscal records of official transactions made on inventory, salaries, among many others. School ERP software simplifies the school’s workload and increases overall efficiency.

Why You Need School ERP Software

School ERP software is important for educational institutes to manage school-related processes. It provides many important features to manage curriculum-related activities along with student information management and administrative tasks. Teachers can especially benefit from school ERP software, as they can easily assign tasks, assess students’ performance, and generate performance report.

Key Considerations Before Buying School ERP Solution

Before making a purchase, you need to be clear about your needs and what you expect from the best school management software. 

• Is student and faculty management the primary reason to buy school management software? 
• Are you looking for a school management system to streamline your administrative duties? 
• Are you more interested in the transport, library or hostel management features? 

Having clarity of your requirements will also let you identify the best solution and accordingly, customize it to fulfil your needs.

Common Features of School Management Software

• Admission Process: School software facilitates with admission processes like submitting admission-related documents and sending out news regarding who cleared the admission process.
• School Transport and Logistics: The transport management module helps assign buses to students, schedule bus timings, manage bus drivers, etc.
• Homework & Assignment Management: Use school management software to assign homework online, review assignments and share performance grades digitally. 
• School Activities and Task: The Task management feature works with the exam management module and helps with gradebook management and student performance assessment.
• School Library Management: The library management feature helps create an online repository of library resources and access their details anytime from anywhere. 
• Student Report Card Generation (Online/Offline): Faculty members can use this feature to generate reports on student attendance, report card, grades, coursework, assignments, and behaviour. Additionally, reports about different functions pertaining to faculty, administrative staff, campus management, hostel, library, canteen, transport and payroll, can be generated using this feature of school administrative software. 
• Manage Parent Communication: Teachers can send parents reports about their ward’s performance and attendance, reminders about fee payments, etc.
• Fee Management System: Fees calculation is made easy with school database management software. It helps with enrolling students in single/multiple fee plan and generating fee submission receipt.
• School Timetable Software: With the time tracking tool of school management software, one can easily generate a flexible schedule for different semesters and sessions. Teachers can easily plan their programs according to their schedules.

Advanced School Management System Features

• School Hostel Management: School management software’s hostel management feature helps with room’s assigning, maintaining a database of rooms occupied along with details of the occupants, move-in & out dates, and designating wardens and staff for hostel management.
• School Canteen Management: The canteen & food court management feature is used for designing menus, tracking the stock status and setting kitchen schedules along with the staff allocation. 
• Free School Management Software in Excel: School management system solution can help in student management, class management, attendance management, exam management, and income & expenses management. 
• Payroll Management: School management system helps manage the payroll of both teaching & non-teaching staff. The school and college management system perform payroll calculations, tax deductions, reimbursements and deductibles calculations, payslip generation, and any other function associated with payroll. 
• School Billing and Accounting: This school billing software module helps to maintain school accounts and finance reports by updating billing and invoice in the system.
• Scholarships & Financial Aid: The scholarship management feature of a school management solution can be used by the administrative staff to view information about students who have received financial aid/scholarships. It also helps track financial aid and scholarship distribution information and maintain a database of students in the running for scholarship and financial aid.

Key School Management Software Modules

• Admission Management: The best school management software in India helps manage the admission process from the form submission to enrolment, and classroom assigning. 
• School Administration: School administrative tasks can be streamlined with the school management system in India. The entire admission process can be managed online for higher efficiency. 
• Accounts Management: Fee collection, employee payroll, and other school expenses can be managed with top school management system software. 
• Campus Management System: The key function of school management system software is to improve campus operations and automate redundant tasks. The campus management module of school management system helps in managing different verticals like campus administration, visitors & security, gate-pass generation, appointments, etc. Campus management software functions can be further divided into hostel, transport and canteen management.
• Faculty Management System: The faculty management module helps assign classes to teachers schedule timetables and lesson-plan creation. Additionally, the faculty management module also works with the attendance management module to help teachers identify absentees. 
• Leave and Attendance Management System: School management software’s attendance & leave management module records student attendance (through biometrics, ID cards). It does the same for faculty and staff members as well. Using the leave and attendance management software, your school can keep track of absentees and automate the entire leave & attendance tracking process.
• School Human Resource Management System (HRMS): With the human resource management modules, you can create the faculty database, track employee attendance along with student’s presence in the premises.

Benefits/Advantages of School Management Software

• Improved Administrative Efficiency: School management software helps users with the crucial operations integral to a school’s functioning. School management system software ensures the ease of report generation, managing admissions, faculty & student management, examination & assessment management etc.
• Enhanced Engagement and Collaboration: With a school cum learning management software, you can better engage students, faculty and the staff to improve learning & collaboration. The best school management software provides modules for performance assessment, attendance management, classroom scheduling. You can ensure a better and more successful learning & teaching experience. 
• Decreased Operating Cost: The best school accounting software provides you with a detailed idea of your expenses across different verticals, helping you make financial decisions that reduce cost. Additionally, with school management software, you do not need to maintain physical records, thus reducing the money spent on procuring paper and stationery.
• Simplified Processes: School management software simplifies academic and administrative processes. Using school management software, you can manage your school’s functioning seamlessly from start to finish. A student management system ensures an improved student experience, with better performance, which helps in gaining a competitive edge.
• Data Security:  School management solutions are built with the latest security and encryption technology, which keeps your data secure. There’s also the option of maintaining an easy-backup of your data, which is safe against unforeseen circumstances.
• Improved Parent-Teacher Interaction: School management system software comes with email and text integration functions, so you can communicate with parents with ease. Crucial information pertaining to a student’s performance or changes to a school’s policies can be easily communicated with a few clicks.
• Scalability: As your school grows and your student, staff and infrastructure volume expand, you don’t have to worry about switching to another school management software. The best school management system is highly scalable and can support your growing institution with complete ease.
• Simplified Internal Communication: School ERP software bridges communication rift between the staff, management, parents, and students within the institution. School management software lets parents and students connect with teachers and management without requiring them to visit the institution physically.
• Secured Digital Records: The apparent benefits of digital records over paper documents are that they are easier to manage. You can access the school information anytime for anywhere. Paper documents are fragile and can get damaged over time, but digital records kept on cloud servers are tamperproof. school Information in this way can be stored securely and for time indefinite.
• Simplified Management Processes: With school management software, you can monitor the individual staff and students, reallocate teachers during shift changes, etc. School ERP software helps in tracking the activities of teachers, admin staff and students efficiently.
• Online School Admission Information: With this school administration software system module, you can track all the admissions held in a year and generate reports.
• Improve School information/Data System: School information management helps manage student’s details from application form submission to enrolment, classroom-wise division, academic and medical records, examination, facilitates collaboration, etc.
• Online Classroom Management System: Classroom system software helps conduct classrooms online and ensure teacher-student interaction even after classroom hours.

What is School Administration Software?

School Management Software is a database management system that helps schools and other educational institutions manage their day-to-day tasks via automation. School ERP software enables you to do a range of activities starting from fees deposit to monitoring students’ performance. The best school management system also helps you with:

• Planning
• Systematizing
• Staffing
• Administrative tasks and
• Controlling

What's the Purpose of School Management Software?

The purpose of a school management system is to streamline your everyday school-related tasks such as curriculum implementation, financial management, teaching staff and classroom management. With the help of a school management system, it is easier for you to ensure better teacher, student, and parent coordination. All types of administrative and academic tasks can be streamlined with school ERP software.

How Does School ERP Software Help Make Better School Management Strategies

Schools consistently need new strategies to adjust to the demands of a rapidly changing curriculum. School management software helps in planning the best strategies to impart knowledge in a holistic setup. Here’s how school management software helps the management and staff of an educational institute:

• School management software helps in improving the overall performance of teachers, students and the admin staff.
• It enables the school to cultivate a positive attitude in school’s administrative and teaching staff, students and their parents.
• School management software help you execute things in order which ensures task precision and clear communication.
• With school management software, students develop new skills like empathy, social awareness, and group responsibility in a collaborative setup.
• School ERP software enables you to develop and adapt to new policies that help you work in reinventing their objective.
• To maintain a school’s legacy and secure its past achievements of the community, school management software come quite handy.

How Does School Management System Help Manage Financial Activities

• Billing and Invoicing: An apt school management software help the school administration in creating and sending invoices and receiving payments in lesser time. Many vendors also offer an integrated accounting application for various businesses. Easy accounting: Your school can easily keep track and maintain records of tuition fees, personal funds, and other billings using school administration software. The automated billing creates transparency and saves time.
• Automated fee reminders: It gives parents timely updates when their child’s fee is due, or if they skip paying fee for any month. With this school management software, parents can pay fees of the child from any device of their choice or of their convenience.
• Attaining goals: The school management system fulfills the school’s needs and helps all its stakeholders including parents and school administration staff in attaining their goals. With school ERP system, it is easy to calculate how much success has been achieved in any given task.
• Fee segregation: With school management software, you can easily segregate the total number of students that have already paid the fees and those who haven’t. In a quick glance, you can learn how much fee a student owes to the school.

How Does School ERP Software Help with Examination Management?

School ERP automate administrative tasks and offer a range of functionally for every process.

• Exam Enrollment & Attendance: Schools can manage enrollment for an exam, track attendance during the exam and maintain records online with the school ERP system.
• Performance Grading: Generation of grades, creation & printing of transcript or customization of report cards, every task becomes easier with a suitable school management system. Additionally, teachers can calculate weighted grades, averages mean and much more using school management software.
• Ensuring Transparency of the Examination Process: School ERP software provides in-depth analysis of the candidate's performance in academic and co-curricular activities. Students, teachers, and parents can access the grades and ask for corrections if required.

What are the Latest School Management Software Trends

In the last few years, a lot of changes have taken place in the school management software market. The latest school management software trends observed are:

• Increasing popularity of open-source school management software: With several open-source applications emerging in the market, buyers have so many options to choose from. They can try basic modules for free before going for a paid school management solution. The trend also embanks the buyers’ interest in the product (software) and he feels more satisfied to pay for the service.
• Rise in demand for cloud-based school management software: Cloud-based solutions provide flexibility and convenience to the school administration systems. The vendors maintain the software and ensure the software is updated. Moreover, Cloud-based solutions can be accessed remotely and have low upfront costs.
• Using new technologies to make education process effective: School management software are also using new age technologies like AI, virtual reality, gamification, online education, etc. This helps students in enhancing their comprehension on subject topics and clear their doubts.

What's the Average School Management Software Price in India?

While you can start using open source school management software with zero investment forever. There are many paid school management systems available today, which charge a minimal amount per student per month. Free school management systems often provide limited features for classroom management and school administration management.

Cloud-based school management software solutions provide many advanced features to make education and non-education process effective. Further, cloud based school ERP software have reasonable monthly subscription plans.

Key Considerations When Purchasing School Management Software

Some of the key considerations while purchasing school management software are:

• Vendor's rapport in the market: Make sure the school management software vendor you have chosen is active in the market with a strong history and customer base.
• Easy integration: Check whether the school management software you have chosen can be integrated with other essential software for your institution or not. School software should be compatible with the applications for spreadsheet, e-mail, accounting, etc.
• Remote access and networking capabilities: A one of the key features, remote access and networking capabilities are crucial for both the parents and the school management to communicate with each other. It also ensures online education management in a remote setup.
• Backup and security functions: An important feature that you should check before going for any school management software is, checking if it comes with robust backup and data security functions.
• Parent Communication: It is important that school management software provides a separate parent portal to ensure hassle-free teacher-parent interaction.
• Reporting and analytics: For a school management software, it is important that it provides detailed reports regarding the performance of students, faculty, etc.
• Features and pricing: You must compare the school management software price and features against each other to know which option correctly addresses your requirements, at the best possible rates.
• Easily customizable: Larger educational institutions have complex system configuration requirements. Customers from such institutions should go for the school management software that provides higher level of customization. This will ensure hassle-free configuration suitable for existing processes and workflows.

Common Challenges with School Management Software Implementation

Although the School Management System has many advantages it can fail in certain conditions like:

• Modules are not quite user-friendly: For automation of tasks, training the employees is equally important. If it takes time to train the staff and adapt to the new system or technology, then you are less likely to benefit from school management software.
• Lack of a robust digital infrastructure: School ERP systems rely heavily on the internet and electricity for smooth operation. Areas facing the issues of power-cut and low internet connectivity, often find it difficult to adopt the school ERP system.