Choosing preschool software in India: questions worth asking

Search for “best preschool software” and you will find lists written by vendors, in which that vendor comes first. We are a vendor too, so treat this page with the same suspicion — the difference we are attempting is that these questions are ones we would have to answer honestly ourselves, and several of them we would currently answer badly.

• Can I export everything, at any time, without asking you? Your student list, fee ledger and records belong to you. The answer should be an unambiguous yes and you should try it during the trial, not take it on trust.
• What happens to our data if we leave? Ask for the retention period and the deletion timeline in writing. “We would sort that out” is not an answer.
• Where is it hosted, and who else can see it? A specific answer about data residency and sub-processors, not “the cloud”.
• How is one school kept separate from another? Every multi-school platform will say “each school has its own account”. Ask where that boundary is actually enforced — in the application code, or in the database itself.

• Will you sign a data processing agreement? Under the DPDP Act your school is the Data Fiduciary and the vendor is your Processor, and that relationship is supposed to be under a written contract. A vendor who has not thought about this has not thought about the Act.
• How do you record consent, and can I produce it later? Specifically for photographs. “It is in the admission form” is not the same as being able to show what a particular parent agreed to, and when.
• If a parent asks us to delete their child’s data, what happens? You want a procedure, not an assurance.
• Does your invoicing handle exempt supplies? Preschool tuition is generally exempt from GST. A fee module that assumes tax on every line is built for a different kind of business — see our note on GST and preschool fees.

• Does it understand an April-to-March academic year? Products built elsewhere often assume a September start, and it shows up in promotion, reporting and fee cycles.
• Can it do NCF-2022 progress cards, or does it do marks? If the assessment model is percentages and grades, it was not designed for the Foundational Stage.
• What happens when we open a second branch? Ask to see the cross-branch view. Some products handle this by giving you a second, entirely separate account, which is not the same thing at all.

• What is the total for our actual size, including GST? Per-student pricing that omits tax understates by eighteen percent. Ask for the number you will be invoiced.
• Which features are not in this price? The answer determines whether the headline number means anything.
• What is the minimum term, and what happens if we stop? Get the notice period and the refund position in writing before you sign, not after.

• How long does a teacher take to mark attendance for thirty children? Ask to watch it on a phone, on the vendor’s worst-case network, not a laptop demo. If it is slower than a paper tick, your teachers will keep the paper.
• Who does the data migration, and what does it cost? The honest answer involves your messy spreadsheet, not a template.
• Who answers the phone in February when fees are due? And in what language.

Applying the list to ourselves, in the spirit of the thing:

• We have no customers yet. We are pre-launch. If references from comparable schools are decisive for you, we cannot provide them, and you should weigh that heavily.
• We hold no security certification. No SOC 2, no ISO 27001.
• Our backups are operator-run, not scheduled, and we publish no uptime figure because we have no operating history to base one on.
• We do not collect fees online. We issue and track invoices and record payments; there is no payment gateway.

Those are set out at greater length on our security page and about page, and we would rather you knew them during an evaluation than found them afterwards. If they are disqualifying, that is a reasonable conclusion to reach.

What we would put on the other side of the ledger: per-school isolation enforced in the database, every module at one price with nothing important behind a higher tier, consent recorded as a durable trail, and a product built around the Indian academic year and rulebook rather than adapted to it. Whether that outweighs the gaps is your call to make, not ours to assert.