What to Look for in School Management Software: A Nigerian School Owner's Checklist

Choosing school management software is one of those decisions that's easy to get wrong in a hopeful afternoon and then live with for years. The demos all look polished. The feature lists all sound complete. And six months in, you discover that the thing you actually needed was the one nobody mentioned.

So before you sign anything, it helps to know what genuinely matters — and what's just a long list designed to look impressive on a slide. Here's what we'd check, roughly in the order it tends to bite.

1. Does it fit how your school already runs?

This is the one most people skip, and the one that hurts most. Your school has its own structure — its terms and sessions, its classes and arms, its grading scale, the exact shape of its report cards. If the software can't bend to that, you'll spend the year bending your school to the software instead.

Ask to see the settings, not just the dashboards. Can you define your own grading? Your own report format? If you run an Early Years section, is it handled properly, or bolted on as an afterthought? A platform that assumes every school is identical is telling you something about how much it'll fight you later.

2. Can it handle money the way money actually arrives?

Fees in Nigeria don't come through one neat channel, and any tool that pretends otherwise will frustrate your bursar by week two. You need to record both online payments and the cash and transfers that still make up a large share of collections — in the same place, against the same invoices.

Then look past the pretty total. Can you filter and reconcile payments by date, by class, by method? Can you see, mid-term, what's expected, what's in, and what's outstanding? That visibility is the difference between chasing fees with a list and chasing them with a guess.

3. Who can see what?

A school holds sensitive information about children and families. So the question of who can see which records isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole point of putting it in one system.

Check that access is properly role-based: that a subject teacher sees their classes and not the finance ledger, that parents see their own child and no one else's, that you decide what each role can touch. If a platform serves many schools, ask plainly how one school's data is kept separate from another's. A vague answer is an answer.

4. Will parents and teachers actually use it?

The best system in the world is useless if your staff quietly go back to the exam-record notebook and parents never open the app. Adoption lives or dies on friction.

So watch a real teacher's screen, not a sales rep's. How many taps to record a score, send a message, mark attendance? Is there a proper mobile app for parents, or a clunky web page they'll abandon? If it feels like work to the people who have to use it every day, it won't get used — and unused software is just an expensive idea.

5. Is your data safe — and is it yours?

Two separate questions, both worth asking. Safe: how is the information secured and backed up? And yours: if you ever decided to leave, could you get your data out? You hope never to need that answer, but a confident one tells you you're dealing with people who expect to earn your stay rather than trap you into it.

6. What happens when something breaks?

Here's the question nobody asks in a demo and everybody asks at the worst possible moment — the Friday before results go out, when a figure won't add up. When that happens, is there a real person who picks up?

Features are easy to put on a website. Support, on the day you genuinely need it, is the part that can't be faked — and in our experience it's the single biggest predictor of whether a school ends up glad it switched. A shorter feature list with someone who answers beats a longer one that leaves you stranded, every time.

On long feature lists

One last thing. A feature list is a menu, not a meal. Almost every platform will tick almost every box, because boxes are cheap. What separates them is how well the handful of things you'll do every single day actually work — and who's standing behind the software when they don't.

That's the lens we'd use, and honestly, it's the lens we built Minerva to hold up to. Operations, fees, results, communication and admissions in one connected platform — with support from people who actually answer. If you'd like to put it to the test against your own checklist, book a quick demo and judge for yourself.