Ask your school a question. Get a real answer.
What this actually is
It is 10pm. A parent messages the principal asking why a fee reminder went out. The old answer is “I’ll check tomorrow.” With Inkwelly connected to ChatGPT or Claude, the principal simply asks — and the assistant reads the live invoice, the payment history, and the reminder log, and answers.
That connection runs on MCP (Model Context Protocol), the open standard for letting an AI assistant use an outside system safely. Inkwelly ships a hosted MCP server covering 228 tools across 18 modules — the same school data the dashboard shows, reachable in plain language.
As of August 2026, Inkwelly is not aware of any other Indian school ERP that ships a hosted, OAuth-secured MCP server. Most AI “integrations” in this market are a chatbot bolted onto a help page. This is different: the assistant is talking to the actual school record system, under the school’s own permissions.
What people actually ask it
- PrincipalWhich classes are below 75% attendance this month, and who are the students?
- AccountantShow me every unpaid invoice over ₹20,000 in Class 9 and 10, oldest first.
- Group officeCompare fee collection across all four campuses for this quarter.
- Academic headWhich teachers are behind on syllabus coverage in Science?
- Transport in-chargeWhich vehicle documents expire in the next 30 days?
None of these require building a report, exporting a sheet, or knowing where a screen lives. The assistant finds the data and explains it.
Is our data safe? Read this part first
This is the question every school IT head asks, and it deserves the direct answer rather than a reassurance. Access is not a master key handed to a robot. It is a scoped, revocable credential with a hard read/write split.
Your school only
Every connection resolves to one organisation and one school. Tenant isolation is enforced on every single query — a connection physically cannot reach another school’s records.
Mostly read-only
180 of 228 tools cannot write anything. Write access lives in a separate permission namespace, so granting read never quietly grants write.
Writes stop and ask
30 write tools refuse to act on the first call. They return a preview of exactly what will change plus a single-use token; nothing happens until that token comes back unchanged.
Scoped by permission
Tools are filtered by the connection’s grant before the assistant sees them. No fee permission means no fee tools exist for that connection at all.
Every call recorded
Reads and writes are logged against the connection that made them. Writes record the exact record touched, with a readable label, so the school can always answer “what did the AI change?”
Revocable in one click
The school issues access and the school withdraws it, from the admin screen, with immediate effect and no support ticket.
Responses are also deliberately lean: no student photos, no document links, and list results are capped. An assistant gets the facts it needs to answer, not a bulk export of the school. Full security and data-privacy details.
What it covers
Coverage is the point. A single AI tool that reads attendance is a demo; a school runs on the whole record system. Every number below is counted from the shipped registry.
| Area | Tools | Can write |
|---|---|---|
| Academics — classes, subjects, timetable | 26 | 15 |
| Lesson plans & curriculum coverage | 20 | 11 |
| Transport — routes, vehicles, trips, safety | 17 | — |
| Student fees — invoices, payments, dues | 15 | — |
| Homework & submissions | 14 | 6 |
| Events & day plans | 14 | 7 |
| Student attendance | 12 | — |
| School store — stock, orders, dues | 12 | — |
| Letterhead & issued letters | 12 | 7 |
| Staff attendance & leave | 12 | — |
| Students — profiles, transfers, promotions | 11 | 1 |
| Communications — broadcasts, notices, usage | 11 | — |
| Access control (IAM) | 9 | — |
| Finance — day book, money flow, reports | 9 | 1 |
| Employees — profiles, departments, documents | 9 | — |
| Achievements & competitions | 9 | — |
| Group rollups across every school | 8 | — |
| ID cards — batches, templates, verification | 8 | — |
| Total | 228 | 48 |
The list grows as Inkwelly ships. Every module that reaches the dashboard gets its tools, so the gap between “what the software does” and “what you can ask it” keeps closing.
How a school connects
- An administrator opens the AI access screen in Inkwelly and creates a connection for the school, choosing what it may see and whether it may write at all.
- Paste the connection into ChatGPT or Claude as an MCP server. Nothing is installed and nothing runs on a school computer.
- Sign in through the normal Inkwelly login to authorise it, the same way you would authorise any app. The assistant now sees exactly the tools that permission allows.
- Ask a question in plain language — English, Hindi, or Hinglish.
For the IT team: the server is a remote MCP endpoint with OAuth discovery, so standard client configuration works without custom setup. Grants are hierarchical (module, then group, then individual tool), writes sit in a separate write: namespace, and per-connection rate limits apply.
Ask on a demo call for the endpoint, the full tool catalogue, and the scope grammar.
Why this matters more than it sounds
School software has always assumed a person will log in, find a screen, and read a table. That assumption puts every question behind training, permissions, and somebody’s availability. Most school data is therefore never looked at — not because it is missing, but because asking is too much work.
An ERP that an assistant can query removes that cost. The principal who would never open a syllabus-coverage report will ask the question out loud. That is the real change: not a smarter chatbot, but a school where the answer is always one question away.
Questions
What is an MCP server and why does a school ERP need one?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that lets an AI assistant securely use an outside system's data and actions. For a school it means the principal can ask ChatGPT or Claude a question in plain language — 'how much fee is pending in Class 8?' — and get a real answer from live school records instead of logging in and building a report.
Can an AI see my students' personal data?
Only what the connection is scoped to, and only for your own school. Every connection is issued through OAuth against a specific school, carries an explicit permission scope, and is isolated to that tenant at the database-query level. If a connection is not granted fee access, no fee tool exists for it — the tools are filtered out before the assistant ever sees the list.
Can the AI change or delete our school data by accident?
No. Of 228 tools, 180 cannot write anything at all. Write permissions live in a separate grant namespace, so a read scope never silently covers a write. And 30 of the 48 write tools refuse to run on first call: they return a plain-language preview of exactly what would change, plus a single-use token. Nothing is written until a second call carries that token back with byte-identical arguments.
Do we have to install anything?
No. The Inkwelly MCP server is hosted — there is nothing to download, run, or keep updated on a school machine. Anyone with the right permission connects from ChatGPT or Claude by signing in through the normal Inkwelly login, the same way you would authorise any app.
Which AI assistants work with this?
Any assistant that speaks MCP. Today that includes Claude (desktop, web and Claude Code) and ChatGPT, plus a growing list of other clients and agent frameworks. Because MCP is an open standard rather than a private integration, new assistants work without Inkwelly building anything new.
Inkwelly me AI se fees ka data kaise nikale?
School ke admin ko ek baar MCP connection banana hota hai — ChatGPT ya Claude me Inkwelly connect kijiye aur normal Inkwelly login se authorise kar dijiye. Uske baad seedha poochiye: 'Class 8 me kitni fees pending hai?' Answer live school records se aata hai, koi report banane ki zaroorat nahi.
Is there an audit trail of what the AI did?
Yes. Every tool call is recorded against the connection that made it, and every write records the exact record it touched — type, id, and a human-readable label such as the invoice or homework it changed. The school can review, at any time, what an assistant read and what it changed.
What happens if we revoke access?
The connection stops working immediately. Access is a credential the school issues and the school withdraws — from the Inkwelly admin screen, without contacting support and without affecting any other user or integration.
See it answer a question about your school
Book a demo and ask it anything — fees, attendance, syllabus coverage, transport. Live records, your permissions, your school.