School ERP software that is free on your own computer
A school ERP should hold the whole operation in one place: the enquiry that became an admission, the fee head that admission is billed against, the attendance register, the marks, the transfer certificate. B2skool does that — and the version that runs on your own machine costs nothing.
Fee collection across the session, live. Illustrative data — no real school is shown.
What a school ERP actually has to cover
Most packages sold as a school ERP are a student database with a fees screen bolted on. A school runs on more than that, and every gap becomes a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand. These are the eight areas B2skool treats as one system rather than eight products:
Admissions — enquiries from the website, walk-ins and ads on one pipeline through to seat blocked
Fees — fee heads, concessions, instalments, receipts, the day book and recovery
Attendance — exception marking for students, geo-fenced mobile attendance for staff
Timetable — conflict-free period allocation with substitutions, labs and room capacity
Examinations — marks entry grids, grading schemes and board-compliant report cards
Library — catalogue, issue, return, overdue fines posted to the fee statement
Transport — routes, stops, driver allocation and live GPS when you are online
Front office — the visitor register, gate passes, the call log and enquiry desk
Why the ERP you have now is resented
The common failures have nothing to do with features on a brochure. Legacy school ERPs are sold as an upfront licence plus an annual maintenance contract, and after the invoice clears nobody invests in the product again. The screens were built for a database administrator — forty dropdowns and a hundred required fields — so teachers try them twice and go back to the paper diary. The server sits in the accounts room and becomes your problem to patch, back up and keep free of viruses. You end up paying every year for software that stopped improving years ago, and your staff quietly route around it.
On your own computer, free. In the cloud, when you want it
B2skool splits along the line where cost actually sits. A local system needs no servers, no payment rails and no telecom bills, so there is no charge for one: SCHOOL OS Desktop installs on an office computer, runs on a local database, and has no student cap, no annual maintenance contract and no time limit. It works with the internet down, which matters more than any feature list in a school whose broadband drops weekly. The cloud licence adds what a local-only system genuinely cannot do — the parent app, online fee collection with automatic reconciliation, live transport, multi-campus reporting and sync across every device — and it is quoted per school rather than off a rate card.
Moving off your current ERP
The reason schools stay on software they dislike is the move, and that is exactly what the incumbent vendor is counting on. Our onboarding team takes the exports, the fifteen spreadsheets with different column names and the scanned admission register, cleans and maps them, and hands back a populated system with your students, staff, fee heads, concessions and historical ledgers already in it. You verify it against your own registers before anyone goes live. Your office does not do the data entry.
Straight answers
Questions schools ask about school erp software
Is this school ERP really free?
The desktop edition is, with no time limit and no student cap. It runs on a local database on your own computer and the records it holds are yours to export at any time. We charge only for the cloud half — the parent app, online payments, live transport and sync.
Does it work without internet?
Yes. Unlike a pure web ERP that stops when the broadband does, the desktop app runs on an embedded local database. The front office keeps registering visitors, issuing receipts and marking attendance offline, and everything syncs both ways when a connection returns.
Which boards are supported?
Report card templates cover CBSE including the NEP holistic progress card, ICSE, state boards and IB. Tell us your board on the call and we will show you that template rather than a generic one.
Start free today. Decide about the cloud in April.
Install SCHOOL OS Desktop on one office computer this week and run your admissions, receipts, attendance and report cards on it for nothing. When you want the parent app and online fees, we are one call away.