School Management System for Sar***** Public School, RajasthanCase Study

Fee collection was the pressing issue. The majority arrived as cash at the school office, with receipts written by hand and reconciliation happening in a ledger, which made both defaulter tracking and audit genuinely difficult. Follow-up on unpaid fees relied on the accountant's memory and printed lists. The parent base was the constraint that shaped the whole design: smartphone ownership was common but not universal, data connectivity varied, and app installation was a real barrier for a significant minority. A parent portal that assumed a modern smartphone and a data plan would have excluded exactly the families most likely to fall behind on fees. Hindi and English were both needed, with many parents more comfortable in Hindi for anything financial. Attendance was recorded on paper registers and rarely reached parents the same day. The school also had reporting obligations to education authorities that were being met through manual compilation. Budget was genuinely tight — this is a school, not an enterprise.

We built the system on React and Node.js with PostgreSQL, and made a deliberate design decision early: SMS is a first-class channel, not a fallback. Every parent-facing notification — attendance, fee due, fee received, announcements — works over SMS in Hindi or English, so a parent with a basic handset gets the same information as one with a smartphone. The web portal is the richer experience for those who can use it, but nothing important depends on it. Razorpay handles online fee payment, and critically the system also records cash payments received at the office against the same student ledger, so the accountant works in one place and defaulter tracking is automatic rather than remembered. Digital receipts issue over SMS for both payment types. Attendance is captured per class on a phone or tablet, with same-day absence notification to parents — a change the school considers its most visible improvement. Authority reporting exports directly in the required formats. We kept the build tightly scoped to fees, attendance, communication and reporting, deliberately excluding features the school did not yet need, which is how the project fit the budget. Office staff were trained on cash receipting first and everything else second, because that was the process with the most immediate risk if it went wrong during the transition. The system was rolled out one branch at a time with the first branch running for a full fee cycle before the others followed. Related: custom software development and our education sector work.