Choosing school management software in Pakistan: a buyer's checklist

Every school management demo looks good. They are built to. Here are the questions that tell you what you are actually buying — grouped by what goes wrong later.

1. Can a receipt be edited after it is issued? If yes, walk. Corrections must be dated reversals.
2. Do fees post into real double-entry accounts, or into a collections summary? A summary means your accountant keeps a second set of books.
3. Is there a trial balance, a P&L and a balance sheet? If not, it is not accounting software, and you will still need one.
4. Can we adopt mid-year with opening balances? If not, you are waiting until next July.
5. Does it handle §153 and §149 withholding, and provincial sales tax by province? Imported software almost never does.
6. Are amounts stored as integers? Floating-point money drifts. Ask; a serious vendor will know exactly what you mean.

1. Does a queued offline mark record when it was taken, or when it uploaded? This one question eliminates a surprising number of vendors.
2. Is there one register or two? Classroom and gate, reconciled, catches what neither catches alone.
3. Can a register be edited silently after the day closes? There should be a correction request with an approval trail.
4. What happens at the gate when somebody is refused — does it say why?

1. How is our data isolated from other schools? "Separate accounts" is not an answer. Ask what enforces it.
2. Is there an audit log, and what is in it? Ask to see a real one during the demo.
3. Can we export everything, at any time, without asking you?
4. Is our data used to train AI models?
5. Who at the vendor can see our data, and is that access logged?

1. When we add a campus, is it a new system or a new campus? Consolidated reporting across campuses is either designed in or impossible.
2. What happens when a teacher leaves? Access revoked, chat closed, assets returned, final settlement blocked until clearance — or a manual checklist somebody forgets.
3. Who does the setup? A system you configure yourself is a system you can configure wrongly, and you will find out in month four.
4. What does support actually mean? A phone number, a person who knows the product, or a ticket queue.
5. Show me the report I will be asked for on the worst day. For most principals that is "who is on campus right now". If the answer takes longer than ninety seconds, note it.

Ask the vendor to tell you something their product does badly or does not do at all.

A vendor who cannot answer that has either not thought hard about their product or is not going to be straight with you when something breaks. Both are worth knowing before you sign.

---

*If you are running this checklist against Ilmora, we would rather answer it honestly than pass it. Book a demo and bring the list.*