School ERP & Student Information System for Al F***** Education Group, UAECase Study

The group's fee structure was the first surprise. Fees varied by grade, by term, by sibling discount, by staff discount, and by a set of negotiated arrangements that existed in the finance manager's head and a spreadsheet — any system that assumed a simple per-grade fee was going to fail on contact with reality. Regulatory reporting to the local education authority required data in specific formats on a fixed schedule, and the existing process involved exporting to Excel and reformatting by hand each cycle. The language requirement was genuinely technical rather than cosmetic: right-to-left layout affects form flow, table alignment, date pickers, report layout and the direction of iconography, and the previous system's mirrored English design produced screens that Arabic-reading parents found disorienting. Report cards had to render correctly in both languages, including mixed content where subject names appear in English within Arabic text. On top of this, the group had an admissions season deadline — the system had to handle the next intake or wait a full year.

We built the platform with React and Node.js on PostgreSQL, treating Arabic and English as equal first-class locales from the first component rather than adding RTL later. Layout direction, typography, numeral formatting and date handling are locale-driven throughout, and report card templates were designed separately per language rather than one template flipped. The fee engine was built as a rules layer rather than a table — grade, term, sibling and staff discounts and individually negotiated arrangements are all expressible without a developer, which is what let the finance manager move off the spreadsheet. Regulatory reporting exports are generated directly in the required formats, removing the manual reformatting cycle. Admissions runs as a proper pipeline from enquiry through assessment to enrolment, with the parent-facing portion working on a phone because that is how UAE parents actually apply. Payment integrates with a local gateway supporting the cards UAE families actually use, with fee statements available in both languages. Access is scoped by campus and role, and academic records carry retention rules. We ran a bilingual user testing round with Arabic-first parents before launch rather than after, which caught several form flows that read correctly but felt wrong in sequence when working right-to-left. Fixing those pre-launch cost days; fixing them post-launch would have cost adoption. Related: custom software development and our education sector work.