I manage the administration for an independent private primary school in the Paris suburbs with 220 students and 18 teachers. Our annual tuition averages around 3,800 euros per student, but between building rent and teacher salaries our budget is extremely tight. Up until now, we’ve handled grade entries, daily attendance, and parent communication through messy spreadsheets and email threads; however, as the number of parents grew, the margin for error became way too high.
The major school management platforms charge an annual license fee of 6 to 10 euros per student, which adds an extra burden of 1,500–2,000 euros a year for us. Some vendors have also quoted a one-off setup and data migration fee of 1,200 euros. We really don’t want to allocate budget to this line item.
We want to switch to open-source software or something with a solid free tier. Can grades, attendance parent updates and most importantly, overdue installments or invoice tracking run reliably on a free system? If we need to switch platforms down the line, what kind of risks will we face when exporting parent and grade data?