We have replaced abandoned school software eleven times in the last three years. In almost every case the institution asked the wrong questions during the sales meeting — and found out what they should have asked six months later.

Buying management software is not like buying furniture. The cost of the wrong decision is not the licence fee; it is two years of staff working around a system nobody trusts, plus the migration you eventually pay for anyway. Here are the seven questions we tell principals to ask any vendor, including us.

1. Can we see the system with our own data in it?

Every demo looks good with fifteen sample students. Ask the vendor to load one class of your real data — names in Bangla, your actual fee heads, your real subject list — and then run a result processing cycle in front of you. Systems that break on Bangla names or non-standard grading schemes usually break at exactly this point.

2. Who does the data migration, and is it included?

Migration is where most projects quietly go over budget. Get it in writing: who cleans the data, who maps the columns, who verifies the result, and whether it costs extra. If the answer is "you send us a clean Excel file", ask what happens when your file is not clean — because it will not be.

The single best predictor of a successful go-live is not the software. It is whether the office staff were involved before the contract was signed.

3. What happens to attendance SMS when the credit runs out?

A small question that reveals a lot. Good systems queue the messages, flag the failure on the dashboard and retry when credit is topped up. Weak ones silently drop them — and you find out when a parent complains that they were never told their child was absent for a week.

4. Can a teacher use it on a ৳8,000 phone?

Your subject teachers will take attendance on their own phones, not on a lab desktop. Open the attendance screen on a low-end Android device over 3G and try to submit a full class. If it takes more than a few seconds or the buttons are too small to tap accurately, your teachers will go back to paper within a month.

5. What does support actually cover, and for how long?

"Lifetime support" usually means "we will answer the phone if we feel like it". Ask for the specifics in the contract:

  • Response time for a critical issue, in hours, during working hours
  • Whether bug fixes in delivered features are free — they should be
  • What counts as a new feature, and what that costs
  • What happens after the included period, and the renewal price

6. Can we export everything, at any time?

Your student records, results and financial ledger are yours. Ask for a full export — not a summary report, an actual dump you could import elsewhere — and test it during the trial. A vendor who hesitates here is telling you something important about the next five years.

7. Who exactly will be working on this, and can we meet them?

Many software houses sell with senior staff and deliver with whoever is free. Ask who will write the code, who you call when something breaks, and whether those are the same people you met. In a small team the answer is usually yes. In a large one, it usually is not — which is fine, as long as you know it going in.

A short note on price

The cheapest quote is almost never the cheapest system. Compare total cost over three years: licence, migration, training, hosting, SMS credits, support renewals and the cost of the staff time lost during a bad go-live. We publish our full package pricing precisely so that comparison is possible.

If you are evaluating systems right now and want a second opinion on a quote you have received — even if it is from a competitor — send it to us. We will tell you what we think is missing from it.