Every one of these is a question we have been asked and had to answer. Several are uncomfortable for us, which is rather the point of a list worth using.
Take it to any supplier, including us. A demonstration is designed to show you what a system does well; these are the questions that find out what it does badly.
The most important question on this list and the one least often asked. Ask to see an export — an actual file, not a promise. Marks, students, fees. If the answer is "we would generate a report for you", the honest translation is that leaving means retyping years of records, and you should price the system accordingly.
Six hundred names, classes, sexes and dates of birth is a fortnight of work for somebody. Import from a spreadsheet turns it into an afternoon. Ask to watch it happen with a sample of your own data during the demonstration.
The right answer is that they are archived and their record stays intact. If they are deleted, you cannot produce a transcript for a former student in three years' time — and you will be asked to.
On the 0–3 identifier scale, or converted into percentages so they fit columns built for the old curriculum? The second is very common and it is not the curriculum.
Not a card with two. A term genuinely produces dozens, and a card that is readable with two can be unusable with thirty. We wrote about why this happens.
Schools differ on both, and both change. If the boundaries are fixed in the software, the first time your school revises its scale you are waiting on the supplier.
Ask specifically: can the nurse see a family's fee balance? Can a class teacher open a child in another stream? The answer should be about permissions held at a scope, not about staff being trusted not to look.
Ask to do it on your own phone, on the school's own network, standing in the room where it will actually be used. Not on the supplier's laptop over their office wifi.
Everybody is available in week one. Ask who answers in the middle of term when the bursar cannot reverse a receipt at four o'clock on a Friday, and how.
Including setup, including SMS messages, including any sender ID rental, and including year two's price. The arithmetic is here, and the cheapest headline rate often loses it.
Ask it plainly and listen to the shape of the answer. Every system has gaps. A supplier who names one and tells you how they work around it is a supplier who will tell you the truth in term two. One who says there are none is telling you something either way.
You can look through a whole demonstration school on ours — every kind of account, six hundred invented students — without giving anybody your telephone number.
Look inside