School Administrative Software is one of the most used software for schools and colleges. It reduces the workload of school administrators by helping them automate the usual tedious administrative processes like attendance register maintenance, report card generation, id card generation, transportation management, hostel management, etc..
In this blog post, we will explore in-depth the concept and benefits of school administrative software.
What is School Administrative Software? How is it different from the School Management System?
As the name indicates, the school administration software is used to manage all administrative activities of an educational institute. It can be a school, college or university. In institutes, there are different groups of employees. Most of them are teachers and a few are administrators. A school needs both academic and administrative active managed efficiently by experienced leaders. The first thing that comes to our mind while visualizing a school is the academics and learning process. But a good academic leader may not always be a good administrative leader. Understanding this difference, all the school helps the academic leader, usually principal with the support of an administrative leader. Some groups of institutions appoint a CEO who focuses on administrative and operational issues and the academic activities are led by principals in each institution.
The school administration software takes care of the unique needs of the school admins and usually will have a single or limited login access by the admins. Whereas the School Management System is a fully functional ERP that has got way more features than school administration software and allows login access for all students, parents, teachers, and admins at the same time. School Software Pro is a good example for a fully functional school management software with school administration software features embedded within it.
Features and Benefits of School Administrative Software
The major features available in school administration software are usually a simple student information database containing all basic details of the students in the school, certificate generator with different templates to choose from, grade book generator, id card generator, basic accounting for fee collection, basic human resource management features to handle teacher and staff data to generate and store payslips, attendance management to track attendance of students, timetable management etc.
Let us look at some of these features in detail:
- Basic Student Information Database
This feature will help the admin to store all student data across various academic years. The basic data of the student like parent guardian data, address, etc. will remain unchanged across academic years. The other data like report cards, teacher remarks, attendance, etc. will be updated whenever the data is available. For a small school, a single administrator can handle all these data in and out operations with the coordination from other teachers.
A school or institute require different kinds of certificates for their students. These certificates vary from simple bonafide certificate to attendance certificate. These certificates carry different styles in layout and colors. All these different certificates can be managed efficiently and taken printout whenever required using a certificate creator and generator tool.
The gradebook generator helps in taking creating report cards of students based on their examination grades. These reports can also vary in size and format according to the examination format selected by the institution. The reports are generated in bulk and printout is also taken in bulk to distribute to students and parents.
This tool helps the admins to generate identification cards for students and teachers which they will carry daily to the institute. The ID card is automatically generated from the data stored in the school administration software and a fresh photo of the student will be scanned each year to generate ID card for that year.
- Basic Accounting
The basic accounting module helps the administrators to keep track of income and expenses. Income is majorly in the form of school fees. The school fees can be collected over the counter or through online and proper receipt will be generated with the help of software.
- Payslip & Payroll
Generating the monthly payslip and managing the payroll of teachers and other staff is usually a time-consuming work for administrators. With the help of the payroll tool, these can be automated. Even the payroll breakup calculation can be automated and some tools contain tax-related calculations also. Once the payslip is generated monthly, it can be taken as a printout to distribute to teachers and other staff.
- Attendance Record
The attendance record of each student is a very important feature of all school administration software. The attendance data is collected from each teacher from their attendance register and then is uploaded to the school administration software by the admin. This attendance data is then used to generate reports and sometimes to combine with grade book reports.
Being one of the most cumbersome activities at the start of the academic year, and a lot of time of teachers and admins are spent on creating timetables, the timetable tool of school administration software helps in creating perfect timetables in the form of class-wise timetable, teacher-wise timetable, and institutional timetable.
- SMS Communication
Short messaging services(SMS) is still one of the best communication medium to outreach to parents. The admins use the bulk sms or individual sms feature of school administration software to send alerts and notifications to parents. The bulk sms tool will provide an option to send SMS to individual student’s parents or all parents in a batch/class or to all parents of the school. This is very efficient as fast to communicate critical information to parents.
- Report Generator
There will be a report center in school administration software that combines data from all different modules and shows them in various formats. These reports are very important for admins and management to take decisions. There will be features to create customized reports as admins require.
All these different functionalities help the admins and other users of the school administration software to derive major benefits in their day to day work connected with the school. The following are some of them.
Benefits for Admins
- Fast access to all the data
- Saves time
- Automates repeated tasks which further helps in saving time
Benefits for Principal
- Access to all reports and data
- Decision making based on data
Benefits for Management
- Access to all reports and data
- Specific reports on school performance
- Income(fee) and expense reports
Benefits for Students & Parents
- No long queues to get reports or pay fees
- Quick communication in the form of SMS
Factors to consider while buying School Administrative Software
- Installation
The most important factor while choosing a school administration software is whether you want to install it on your school premises or use it online as a SAAS(Software as a service) model.
If the software is installed on school premises then, all the data is entered within the school campus and reports are also generated within the campus. The reports are taken printouts for the purpose of distributing to parents and staff. This gives total control on the data entered into the system but also makes any kind of software support difficult as the technician will have to visit the campus to help for maintenance and support.
If you choose to go for a SaaS product where all the functionality of the software will be available online 24/7 and the administrators and teachers can access it even from their homes or mobile phones, the pricing will depend on the total number of users accessing the software. Some vendors charge a fee based on the total number of users per month or per year. Some other vendors give pricing slabs. The slabs are separated based on the number of users. A few vendors like School Software Pro gives unlimited user access even while accessed online 24/7. Such software can give you peace of mind as the pricing will remain the same even when the number of users grows in the future.
- Training & Support:
Other factors to consider are regarding the usage of the software after purchasing it. You must make sure that the vendor gives installation and training support. If the software is installed on the campus premises, the vendor will have to give training to an admin user on critical support. Most of the vendors provide detailed training or supply instruction manuals on the right usage of the software. As an institution owner, you can give the ownership of school administration software to one of the staff in your institute who has good IT skills. If your school is big having more than a thousand students, it will be a good approach to recruit dedicated admin staff to manage the school administration software.
