It is your school's data. Here is how to get all of it back

In February the owner of a 900-student school in Meerut decides not to renew the school's ERP. The renewal quote is 18% higher, the parent app went down twice during fee week, and a better option is ready. So the office asks the vendor for the school's data. The replies arrive over three weeks: a full export is "a chargeable service"; the standard download covers "the current session"; the account manager will "look into it once the pending invoice is cleared". Meanwhile the contract renews itself on 31 March, the delivery reports for last autumn's fee reminders have aged out of the SMS provider's dashboard, and the accountant realises that the only complete record of every family's dues lives on somebody else's server.

Who owns the data in your school ERP?

The school does, in the way that matters. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the school decides why and how student and staff data is processed, which makes it the Data Fiduciary. The ERP vendor processes that data on the school's behalf, which makes it a Data Processor. Section 8(1) keeps the school responsible for that processing "irrespective of any agreement to the contrary", and Section 8(2) allows a vendor to process the data only under a valid contract.

Two honest limits follow. First, the Act's operative duties, Sections 8 to 13 included, come into force 18 months after the November 2025 notification, around May 2027. Second, the Act gives no general right to data portability and places its duties on the school, not on the vendor. So in 2026 your strongest lever is your contract, and the DPDP Act is the reason to get that contract right now.

Your real leverage in 2026

A vendor that stalls is usually betting that the school has no leverage. You have more than you think, and it comes in this order:

What school ERP vendors' public terms say about leaving

Published terms are not your signed contract, and the two can differ. But they show what a vendor considers normal, and they are worth quoting in a written request. As published on 17 September 2026:

Read the windows in those terms carefully. A current-year download leaves every earlier session behind, a 30-day export window closes fast in the March rush, and immediate deletion on cancellation means the export has to happen before you cancel, not after. Whatever your vendor's public terms say, your signed agreement decides, so pull it out before the first phone call.

The complete export checklist

Ask for everything as on a written cut-off date, across all sessions, including students who have left. Tables should come as CSV or Excel files with a column guide, and documents already issued to parents or a board should come as the PDFs actually issued, not regenerated copies:

When the vendor stalls: a seven-step escalation

1. Export what you can yourself, today. Download every report, register and list, module by module, while your login still works and before you give notice.
2. Pull the records that expire. MSG91 lets you download SMS delivery reports only for the last 100 days, and Razorpay limits several report types to 95-day windows, so download those histories in chunks now.
3. Make the request in writing. List the datasets and formats above, a cut-off date and a deadline of about 15 working days, and quote your contract clause and the vendor's published terms.
4. Protect your renewal date. Give notice exactly as the contract requires, and do not let the agreement renew itself while you wait.
5. Keep payments and data separate. Pay undisputed dues on time so the vendor has no pretext, and dispute anything else in writing.
6. Escalate to the top, then to a lawyer. A director-to-director call first, then a legal notice citing the contract and the school's duties to parents.
7. Seek interim relief if the contract supports it. Where the agreement has an arbitration clause, a court can grant interim protection under Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act; your lawyer will advise the right forum.

If you can't get a clean export: rebuild from these sources

None of these sources rebuilds a per-student fee ledger or a concession history, so treat them as cross-checks and partial backups, never as substitutes for the vendor's export:

How to check the export before you trust it

An export nobody has checked is only a promise. These eight checks catch almost every broken migration:

1. Counts: students by class and section, active and left, staff, and TCs issued, against the old system's dashboard.
2. Identity: students matched to your UDISE+ list on PEN, date of birth and parents' names.
3. Fee control totals: for each class and fee head, opening dues plus billed amounts plus fines, minus concessions and collections, plus refunds, must equal closing dues minus advances on the cut-off date.
4. Collections: month-wise and mode-wise totals matched to the bank statement, gateway settlement reports and your accountant's books.
5. Receipt numbers: no gaps or duplicates, cancelled receipts listed, and the last number matching the last printed receipt.
6. Certificates: TC numbers continuous, and the count matching students marked as left.
7. A sample of 25 students: compared line by line with the old screens, including RTE, sibling concession, mid-year admission, left, defaulter and advance-payer cases.
8. Sign-off: the principal and accountant sign the check, the vendor confirms in writing that the export is complete as on the cut-off date, and an untouched copy goes into the school's archive.

Where Inkwelly fits

Moving to Inkwelly costs ₹0 for migration, training and setup, and the Inkwelly team does the data extraction from your current system, or from Excel if the vendor won't cooperate. Student records come in through imports that run a test pass first and save nothing, so problems surface before any data lands. In the one-sheet student import, a row lands whole or not at all, existing students are never overwritten, and no parent is messaged while records move.

Separate importers bring in addresses, parents and class history with a downloadable error file. Old attendance can be imported from another ERP's export, marks come in exam by exam with a preview, and earlier years' dues are carried into each student's fee account. A UDISE+ connector compares your SDMS records with Inkwelly inside your own UDISE+ login. Go-live can be the next working day, with historical records following on their own track. See how we handle switching from your current ERP, or read how to switch mid-session without breaking the year.

“Your data is the one thing a new vendor cannot sell you. Get it out while you still hold the keys.”

Fix the exit before you sign the entry

The best time to secure an export is before you need one. Whichever ERP you choose next, ours included, write the exit into the contract: which datasets, in which formats, within how many days, at what cost, and how long you keep access after termination. Then pull a full export once a year and run it through the checks above.

A vendor confident in its product signs that clause without argument; one that won't has told you something important. Before your next demo, read our questions to ask a school ERP vendor.

Plan your switch around a verified export

Send us your current ERP's export, or tell us what the vendor refused. We will show what imports cleanly, what we rebuild from other sources, and the control totals we check before go-live.