School ERP and admissions CRM
A school group is really running two businesses at once. Admissions works like a sales pipeline, while operations covers fees, staff and timetables. We've built both on Frappe, and we keep the two apart.
Problem and fix
What usually goes wrong, and what fixes it.
01
Enquiries lose their source
Calls, walk-ins, open day sign-ups and ad forms all end up in spreadsheets without a note of where they came from, so you can't tell which campaigns are working.
Source capture
Frappe CRM
02
Enquiries and applications get mixed up
Generic CRMs treat them as one record. But what happened on a call and how far a child has got in admissions are different things, and mixing them up breaks the funnel report.
Enquiry and application
Frappe CRM
03
Fees sit outside the books
School ERPs tend to collect fees and then push them into a separate accounting package, so someone has to put together each campus's profit and loss by hand.
Fee structures and fees
ERPNext with Frappe Education
04
Aggregators outrank you for your own name
When parents search for your campus or your fees, admission aggregator sites show up above your own.
Search audit and fixes
SEO, AEO and GEO
The modules
The Frappe apps and modules we use.
Frappe CRM for admissionsEnquiry and application, Source capture, Event forms, Dashboards
- Enquiry and application
- We keep these as separate records, so a counsellor logging a call outcome never overwrites the admission stage.
- Source capture
- Every enquiry stores its UTM, gclid and fbclid, and Meta lead ads sync straight in, so you can work out cost per admission from the records.
- Event forms
- Each open day gets its own enquiry form, and its web address is fixed when the form is created, so a QR code you've already printed keeps working.
- Dashboards
- Frappe Insights charts showing enquiries by source, campus and stage.
ERPNext with Frappe EducationStudents and enrolment, Fee structures and fees, Attendance, Frappe HR
- Students and enrolment
- Student applicants, programme enrolment, student groups and course schedules.
- Fee structures and fees
- Fee structures and schedules billed to each student, posting into the same ledger as procurement and payroll.
- Attendance
- Teachers mark attendance, and you can see it against the timetable.
- Frappe HR
- Teacher and staff payroll on the same system, with Indian statutory deductions.
Compliance
India compliance notes.
- Fees reconciled to one ledger
- Access to student data by role and campus
- State payroll rules for staff
The detail on eachThresholds, returns and how we set each one up.
- Fees reconciled to one ledger
- Fee receipts, concessions and refunds all have to reconcile with the bank. When fees are billed inside ERPNext, you're reconciling one ledger instead of two.
- Access to student data by role and campus
- Parent and student records are personal data, so we set access by role and campus and keep the data on your own cloud account.
- State payroll rules for staff
- Staff payroll has to follow each state's statutory rules. Professional tax, for example, varies by state, and some states don't levy it at all.
Engagement
How a project with us runs.
01
A call
30 minutes, no charge
02
Discovery
1 to 2 weeks, paid
03
Blueprint
Included in discovery
04
Build
3 to 8 weeks
05
Acceptance
1 to 2 weeks
06
Go-live and run
Ongoing
We explain the full method, and why we charge for discovery, on the services page.
Evidence
Our work in this sector.
Two of the education case studies below are client engagements. The school ERP is a reference build we made to test the design, and it's marked as one.
- Client engagementAn admissions CRM that runs alongside the school's existing ERP instead of replacing itK-12 school group, nine campuses9Campuses live4 weeksSignature to go-live
- Client engagementAn SEO audit of six web properties on four different stacks, five of them with no analyticsMulti-campus education group40Findings, all reproduced live6Properties audited
- Reference buildA full school group ERP, built to show that fees and accounts can share one ledgerReference build, not a client deployment~3,500Students seeded68,740Attendance rows
Questions buyers actually ask.
No. The admissions CRM we built for a nine-campus group runs alongside the school ERP they already had. Admissions works like a sales pipeline, so you can sort it out on its own.
It's open source, you can configure it as you need, and there are no per-seat licences. We also took out the deal and organisation objects, because a child getting a seat isn't a B2B deal.
Our nine-campus deployment took four weeks from signature to go-live. We kept the configuration in code, so nobody had to set anything up by hand on the live site.
Yes, if you bill fees in ERPNext with Frappe Education. In our reference build, a full fee cycle posted into the same ledger as procurement and payroll.
Yes. We audited six web properties for an education group and found 40 issues we could reproduce, including headline stats that showed up as zero to search engine crawlers.
Services for this sector.
- Frappe CRM implementationPipelines that match how your team actually sells or admits.
- ERPNext implementationAccounts, stock, buying, selling and manufacturing, with your setup kept in code.
- SEO, AEO and GEOSearch work that we measure by the enquiries it brings in.
- Website developmentFast sites that search engines can read, with enquiry forms that feed straight into the CRM.
- Frappe HelpdeskTickets, SLAs and a customer portal on the same database.
Let's start with a call.
Thirty minutes, free of charge, and you won't sit through a sales deck.