School management software is a tool that is specifically designed to streamline the paperless administration of schools and educational institutions. It consists of various modules that greatly help the teachers and staff in maintaining student records, academic history, and other essential student information. An efficient school management system acts as a unifier for the different departments/functions and can be accessed from any location. Web-based school management software is the best way to manage a school in a productive, systematic and organized manner.
School Management Software Modules
1. Campus Management: The main aim of a school management system is to improve campus workflows and automate repetitive tasks. With campus management module, schools can manage various verticals like campus administration, visitors and security, generation of gate-pass, appointments, and more seamlessly. It helps in streamlining these areas.
2. School Information Management: For any school, it is vital to maintain student and faculty database. This module assists in handling admissions, student registrations, division of classrooms, and generating and distributing examination admit card. Some of the school software offers automatic classroom wise division. It calculates the total number of students, faculty, and classrooms, verifies the set student-teacher ratio, and divides accordingly.
3. Faculty Management: In school management software, this module does the job of assigning classes to teachers. It schedules timetables and also assists the faculties in creating lesson-plan. Faculties can also share resources with other faculty members. Moreover, this module works in correlation with the attendance management to track the absenteeism of teachers.
4. Student Management: With this module, the admin and users can obtain complete information about a particular student. Right from student's registration details to the admission process, users can add, modify, and view the details quickly. It also includes a student's profile with photographs, family and guardian detail, inbuilt ID card, well-designed reports, and customer search reports. Most of the school management system generates students' roll number automatically. It also facilitates users to upload documents.
5. Examination Management: For most educational institutions, examination management is a daunting task. It involves calculating exam eligibility, creating question papers, assigning classrooms, and assessing the scores. But, with the best school management software in India, you can leverage the benefits of examination management.
This module works on three different levels – pre-exam, exam days, and post-exam. In pre-exam, it sends notification regarding the exam to teachers and students. It schedules exam dates, creates a list of eligible and debarred students, calculates exam fees, generates admit cards, assigns examination halls and invigilators, and also helps with the creation of exam papers.
Exam day aspect works as a student information system. It keeps a record of who've appeared and generated a list of answer sheets accordingly. In post-exam, the module helps in preparing and assigning grades to the students as per the marks are given. It also helps with result analysis, making scorecards and lists for the same to put up on the notice board.
6. Leave and Attendance Management: As the name suggests, this module maintains a record of students' attendance. It can be via biometrics, ID cards, or with a manual register. This includes the time for entry and exit from the class, and the number of leaves taken. The same process applies for faculties and other staff. Keeping such a record can help the schools to calculate fine and also automate the leave and attendance handling process.
7. Student Fee Management & Payroll System: It is an integral part of student fee management software. It does a lot of tasks right from fee plan creation to categorizing students under single or multiple fee plans, generating fee receipts, creating reports, and more.
The payroll system takes care of the teaching and non-teaching staff. It performs every function related to the payroll – calculates payroll, deducts taxes, calculates reimbursements and deductibles, generates payslip, and a lot more. This module is efficient to distribute correct salary to the entire staff and auto-updates itself in case of new tax norms. Furthermore, it is GST compliant.
8. Human Resource Management: This module of school management system enables institutions to have a centralized employee database and thus manage it in a better way. It can also maintain employee's profile with all the necessary information – contact details, dependent's information, education details, work history, and more. This module can also be used for configuring master settings and keeping track of employees' working hours, attendance, and leaves. Moreover, employees can use the same to apply for leave, view their attendance details, and time-sheet.
9. Library Management: With this module, schools can manage the libraries easily and ensure a streamlined, smooth workflow. It helps in maintaining a record of the number of books in the library, books issued, issue date, return date, books due to fines, and also the purchase requirement for books. Some SMS software even defines the rules for book issue. It also supports class-wise book allocation. Moreover, barcode integration will make tracking the books more accessible.
10. Inventory Management: It facilitates schools to check and maintain stock levels of critical items. If there is a store on the campus, the best school management software in India offers you to define store and stock category. It keeps vendor list and contact details so that schools can reach out to them whenever required. Further, this module provides safety stock alert, and reports for stock item purchase, consumption, issue/return, and transaction.
11. School Timetable Management: Managing a school timetable is tough. This module of school software makes it easy to create and maintain the timetable of students and teachers. It sends an alert in case the subject limits exceed, or there is teacher occupancy.
Advantages of School Management Software
The major benefits of having a fully-featured school management system for school are:
Efficient Information management
An SMS or School management system can contain well-managed & non-redundant information about teachers, staff, students, and parents. The retrieval and updating this data is easier as compared to paper-based methods.
Easy and Faster Communication
Notifying about the fee, report cards, parent-teacher meetings, events, library dues, examinations, and more is simple with these software modules.
User-friendly and hassle-free to use for teachers and parents
A good school portal is designed to engage teachers, parents, and students with its simple to use interface.
Information Tracking
SMS makes it smooth for everyone to track attendance, fee submissions, examination schedules and more.
Access from anyone
Most of the parents are too busy to visit the school. As the software for school management is generally mobile-friendly, they can access it from the phone also. This feature increases convenience from teachers and staff also.
Transparency
With school management system, it is impossible to hide any necessary information from the users.
Some examples of better information flow are:
Even if a student is absent, he/she can check the examination schedule.
Exam reports can be seen directly on the portal. Hence, manipulating parents with wrong details is not possible.
Fee information remains error-free and available to every authorized person.
Complaints and Query Management
Feedback management for students and parents is enhanced with the in-built complaint registration system.
Why Your School Needs School Management System?
Technology has simplified the procedure of doing everything and it has eased down the things for schools also.
Some other hard-to-ignore benefits of having the best school management software are:
Performs indirect School branding, as the parents will have a good impression of school in mind.
Allows connecting with every small and big authority/part of the school.
May come integrated with a CMS (In this case, you’ll be able to handle website designing and promotion tasks from the SMS itself)
It will improve the productivity of teachers as they don’t have to manage the side-tasks anymore.
The information saved in SMS can be retrieved or edited from anywhere through mobiles, laptops or desktops enabled with the Internet.
Complete automation of school processes allows easy tracking and at the same time, it gives better insights into the data to school management.
Through this, decision-making can be improved.
Employee and customer satisfaction increases.
Enables the students to understand and use technology practically.
Saves money for the schools by eliminating the expenses of stationery and human work.
How School ERP Software Handles Online Examination Management Efficiently?
Many schools today are incorporating technology in every facet of their day-to-day operations. This is not restricted to teaching and administration alone, it has started being extended to testing and examinations as well. As students have increasingly begun to employ technology for studying and learning, the testing methods have also evolved. Coaching centers, schools, and universities are slowly but surely getting used to school management software. This has helped these institutions a great extent, especially when it comes to conducting examinations in the online mode. The move from paper to automated examinations has been a long time coming. It is not only faster and more accurate than paper-based exams, but it is also environmentally friendly and costs less.
School ERP software has facilitated this transition immensely. Let’s go into detail regarding how school management software has been crucial in helping educational institutions administer and manage online examinations in an efficient manner.
Eliminating Unnecessary Costs
As previously mentioned, school management software, enables schools to cut out the unnecessary costs involved in administering offline examinations. Preparing question papers, arranging for tons of answer sheets, and spending hours grading these answer sheets: this is what a typical offline examination cycle looks like. The online examination module of school ERP software simplifies this process by eliminating paperwork and making grading automatic or semi-automatic. MCQ (Multiple Choice Question) tests can be automated entirely with accurate results, only the data entry for the question paper has to be perfect. It also eliminates location constraints, for students can appear for exams from wherever they are if they have a working internet connection. The process is faster and more convenient for both faculty, administration, and students.
Better Feedback
As the time is taken to compile exam results shortens, the teachers in charge of the same can give better, more in-depth feedback to their students. There are some of the school management software which can be programmed to provide personalized feedback for each test, but most school ERP software provide basic details of the test such as % questions correct and wrong, percentile score (ie how much better the candidate did on a test than the other candidates who took that test), and grade. Questions in question banks can also be tagged with their difficulty levels, which can help the candidates to see which easy or must-do questions they missed out on. This feature is extremely helpful when it comes to competitive examinations. Overall, a good school management software enables for a faster in-depth feedback process allowing students to focus on improving their weak areas.
Security and Reporting
School ERP software are generally equipped with robust data security and backup mechanisms. After all, it holds a vast amount of crucial confidential information ranging from personal details of faculty members and students to student medical records. This makes it imperative that your school ERP solution be equipped with strong security. As for reporting, it helps faculty members and administrative staff keep a check on student performance, various budgets, attendance and more. A good ERP solution for schools has all the relevant reports as well as custom reports. It assists the school board in judging the performance of its students as well as its staff.
Latest Market Trends of School Administration Software
To ensure increased automation and ease in running the educational institutions, school management software developers are bringing in a vast number of new modules and features. Besides automating data management, it is equally essential to make extracurricular activities accountable. So, some of the latest trends seen in school management system are:
Mobile Apps
Smartphones have taken the world by storm. Adults, as well as children, have access to mobile phones and their related applications. Hence, school administration software companies are moving towards developing a mobile app for their software. This aids administrators, school staff, and students to access the system from anywhere and at any time.
Interactive Learning
The school management system has come up with features like Interactive Learning, where learning the subject is made interesting. Interactive Learning includes – blog posts, social media posts, subject-based quizzes, questionnaires, and games, online video sessions, webinars, and much more. Students can even ask their queries on online discussion forums and get an instant solution from subject experts. Thus, learning is made fun, easy, and motivating.
Efficient Data Handling
With an increased number of student enrolments, institutions are expanding their reach. With this accompanies the issue of data management. So, school management software companies are making sure that they develop software that handles even large amount of data proficiently. Thus, they produce software that can be easily deployed in the cloud. Cloud-based software facilitates school administration to handle massive amounts of data flawlessly and without any technical glitches. Moreover, cloud-based solutions can be assessed remotely.
Student Behaviour Tracking
Schools not only impart education to students, but they also play a vital role in developing students as people contributing to the world. So, it is essential to collect student data – both scholarly and extracurricular – to understand a student. School management software can do this task efficiently and precisely.
Enhanced Analytics
For every industry, Analytics is a primary function. Since it collects data from different sources and provides accurate information in a statistical format, it helps organizations to take firm decisions. School administration software companies are also incorporating the analytics feature into modules like attendance, payroll, finance, examination results, and more.
Automated Management
With an introduction to automation in different field like library management, transportation management, fee collection, attendance records, and salary distribution, school management software eases the processes and make sure they produce precise results.
Advanced Reporting
Apart from helping students and staff, school management system also enhances the teacher-parent relationship. It ensures transparency in the education system. With facilities like instant messaging and emails, parents and teachers can interact seamlessly. Parents get the progress reports of their child periodically via message or email. They can even log in to the system to access the reports.
Integration with Existing Systems
To manage daily school administration tasks like accounting and finance, attendance, communication, and more, institutions might make use of different software. To streamline all these processes, school management software must be able to provide easy integration with the systems that are already in use by schools.
Frequently Asked Questions related to School Management Software:
Q1. Which capabilities should be present in a good School Management System?
Answer: An efficient software solution, developed to serve the academic institutes, should be able to handle the fee management, student/staff record management, attendance management, timetable scheduling, homework management, exam data management easily. Apart from this, it should be able to let the parents, administrative staff, teachers, and students communicate through it. Important notifications should be delivered to the emails and portal accounts of the SMS users.
Q2. How is the cost calculated for the schools?
Answer: The cost of using such software is generally calculated according to the number of users, registered to the portal. So, the schools will be charged on the ‘per-user’ basis.
Q3. What’s the minimum requirement to start using a Software for School?
Answer: Be it a primary school or secondary school, or even a university, having an SMS integrated to their managerial system allows better information management and circulation. So, the minimal requirement is to have a school with some users to reach and update the system.
Q4. What are the types of these solutions, available in the market?
Answer: Currently, School Software modules are in offline type as well as of online type. Cloud solutions are also available.
Q5. Which of these types will be the best for our academic institute?
Answer: It is advisable for the big schools and colleges to go for the online or the best, for cloud-based solutions. If your school is operating at a very small level, online and offline solutions can be considered as your choice.
Q6. Is it hard to use School Management Software?
Answer: Not at all. These software systems are designed keeping the user convenience in mind. Anyone, who has some knowledge of operating computers, can use them.
Q7. What’s the proficiency needed for such software? Do we need to give special training to our staff?
Answer: Computer literacy is needed but it’s not required for you to be an expert in operating computers. It will take some hours to understand the whole working mechanism of the school software.
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