School ERP buying guide 2026: 12 questions to ask every vendor

We’ve sat through dozens of ERP demos with school leaders. Most look identical on the screen — the same dashboards, the same modules, the same bullet points on the deck. The differences only become visible after you’ve signed: when you try to import last year’s data, when a parent app crashes during fee week, when you ask for an export and discover your data isn’t really yours.

This is the buyer’s checklist we wish every school had in its hand before signing. Print it. Take it into the next demo. The vendors who answer cleanly are the ones worth shortlisting.

1. Who owns the data, contractually?

Ask for the clause in writing. The school should be the data controller; the vendor is a processor. If a sales rep can’t cite the clause, the contract probably doesn’t have one.

2. Can we export everything — tomorrow — in a usable format?

CSV and JSON, all modules, no per-export fees, no “contact support” gating. Lock-in by inertia is the most common reason schools stay on bad software.

3. What does day-one onboarding actually look like?

Ask for a written migration plan, not a vague “our team will help.” Who imports the data? How long does it take? What’s the rollback if something breaks mid-term?

4. Is the parent app under 10MB and offline-capable?

Half your families are on entry-level Android with limited storage and patchy connectivity. A 60MB app that needs 4G to load attendance is going to be uninstalled within a week.

5. How are fee gateway charges handled?

Are convenience fees passed to parents (and how much), or absorbed by the school? Are there flat per-transaction fees on top of gateway costs? Get the all-in number for a typical 1,000-student term.

6. What’s your uptime in the last 12 months — with proof?

Ask for a status page or a signed uptime report. Anyone can claim 99.9% on a slide. Schools lose serious goodwill when the parent app is down on fee day.

7. Who in your company answers the phone at 9am on the first day of term?

Get a name and an SLA. “Email support@” isn’t an answer. The first week of an academic year is when ERPs fail visibly — and visibly.

8. Are you NEP 2020 and APAAR-ready today?

Holistic report cards, 5+3+3+4 structure, APAAR ID generation, DigiLocker integration. Ask for a working demo of each — not a roadmap slide.

9. What does it cost in year three?

Year-one pricing is often a hook. Get a written commitment on year-two and year-three rates, and on what happens if your student count grows by 20%.

10. How are role permissions structured?

Can a teacher see another teacher’s class? Can an accountant see exam data? Can a parent see another family’s record by guessing IDs? The answer should be a clear no, backed by tenant-level access controls on every API call.

11. Where is the data hosted, and is it encrypted at rest?

AWS / Azure / GCP region in India is now the default expectation. AES-256 at rest. TLS 1.2+ in transit. Field-level encryption for medical and financial data. If you have to ask twice, walk away.

12. Show me your last three product releases

An active product ships visible improvements every month. A dormant one ships marketing emails. The release cadence tells you whether you’re buying living software or a stagnant one.

“Demos are designed to make every ERP look the same. These twelve questions are designed to make them look different.”

How EduPlux answers these

We’d be glad to walk you through our answer to every question on this list, in writing, in a 30-minute call. No slides, no fluff — just the contract clause, the export button, and the status page. Write to us and we’ll set it up.