Excel, registers, and the day they stop working. What changes when you move.
Nobody should feel bad about running a school on Excel. It's flexible, everyone knows it, and it costs nothing. It also has a ceiling, and most schools hit it at roughly the same place.
- Go-live
- Next working day
- Price
- ₹49–₹199 per student per year
- Migration
- ₹0 — we do the extraction
- Pilot
- 90 days, pro-rata refund
Where the ceiling usually is
It's rarely a dramatic failure. It's the accumulation: the fee sheet only one person can safely edit, the version confusion when two people edited it anyway, the afternoon lost to reconciling a bank statement against a collection sheet, the parent who insists they paid and the receipt nobody can find.
The other half is the questions you can't answer quickly. How much is outstanding across the school right now? Which class has the worst attendance this month? Which twenty families should we call today? Every one of those is a person-hour in Excel and a glance in a proper system.
Excel versus a school system
| Inkwelly | Excel and registers | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can work at once | Everyone, with role-based access | One person per file, safely |
| Fee reconciliation | Automatic against UPI, gateways and bank transfers | Manual, against a statement |
| Parent communication | WhatsApp to a whole class or the whole school in a click | Phone calls and printed circulars |
| Report cards | Generated in your board's format from marks already entered | Rebuilt by hand each term |
| Audit trail | Every change recorded with who and when | None |
| If a laptop dies | Nothing lost — daily encrypted backups | Depends entirely on the last copy |
| Cost | ₹49–₹199 per student per year | Free, plus the hours |
Where Excel is genuinely the better choice: a very small school with a handful of staff and simple fees may spend more effort adopting a system than it saves. If two people run everything and nothing is going wrong, wait. The point at which this stops being true is usually around a few hundred students, or the first time a fee dispute can't be settled from records.
You don't lose your history
This is the fear that stops most schools, and it's misplaced. Your spreadsheets are the easiest migration we do — no vendor to chase, no export to negotiate. We take the sheets as they are, including the messy ones, clean the duplicates and the dead phone numbers, and load them into a staging school for you to check.
Old registers can come across too. Where a class list or a fee ledger only exists on paper, we work from photographs of the pages. It's slower, but it's a one-time effort and it means the switch doesn't start your records from zero.
What the first month looks like
- Day one: teachers marking attendance on their phones, parents getting absence alerts on WhatsApp.
- First fee cycle: invoices raised in bulk, reminders sent automatically, payments landing against the right student without anyone typing them in.
- First month end: collection, outstanding and defaulter lists ready without a spreadsheet being opened.
- Ongoing: the office still uses Excel — for the things Excel is actually good at, which is ad-hoc analysis, not being the school's memory.
Frequently asked
What does Inkwelly cost?
₹49–₹199 per student per year, flat at any school size — no enrolment slabs and no per-module upsell. A 500-student school on the middle plan is about ₹49,500 a year. Migration, training and setup are ₹0. The only external costs are WhatsApp message fees and your payment gateway's transaction charge, both billed at cost.
How quickly can we go live?
Go-live can be the next working day. You pick the date; we don't need months of parallel running to get there. Bringing across years of historical records — old marks, past fee ledgers, archived certificates — runs on its own track afterwards and doesn't hold up day one.
Can we try it before committing?
90-day paid pilot on your real data. If it isn't working at day 90, pro-rata refund and your data back in standard formats. We don't offer a free trial on dummy data — it proves nothing to either of us. The pilot runs on your real students, your real fees.
Our fee structure is complicated. Sibling discounts, staff wards, RTE, part payments, late fines.
That's normal and it's all standard. Sibling and staff concessions, RTE students, transport charged by distance slab, part payments against an invoice, late fines by day or by period, cheque tracking including bounces. Bring your actual fee sheet to the demo — the awkward cases are the ones worth testing, not the simple ones.
What if we want to go back to Excel?
Then you export and you're back where you started, only tidier. Everything comes out in standard spreadsheet formats whenever you ask. We'd rather you could leave easily and chose not to.
Do we need a computer person on staff?
No. There's nothing to install and nothing to maintain — it runs in a browser and on phones. Setup is ours, and we're on WhatsApp when something needs a hand.
Our teachers aren't confident with software. Will they actually use it?
The teacher app does one thing well — attendance and marks, in under a minute a class, on any Android phone, in Hindi or your regional language. We do a full day of on-site training at go-live and stay on WhatsApp through the first month. If a teacher is still struggling after that, we come back at no cost.
What about parents without a smartphone?
Every WhatsApp notification falls back to SMS. Printed receipts, fee chalans and report cards stay available exactly as now. The aim is to serve the 95% on WhatsApp properly without cutting off the 5%.
See Inkwelly next to Excel and registers
30-minute demo. We open your Excel and registers account with you and load your data into Inkwelly live. Dated go-live plan by end of call.