Buying guide8 min read
12 questions to ask before you sign an ERP contract
A demo is a performance. The salesperson knows the script, the data is clean, and nothing fails. These twelve questions are the ones that decide what the next five years feel like, and none of them are answered by watching a screen.
Checked against vendor websites on .
iVake publishes this checklist. Where another product is named, the fact comes from that vendor's own public pages on the date shown. If a page has changed since, or we have read it wrongly, write to hello@ivake.com and we will correct it.
Print this. Take it into every demo, including ours. Ask the questions in order, write the answers on the sheet, and do not accept “we will look into that” on the two or three that matter to your institution. A vendor who cannot answer these in a first meeting will not answer them faster after you have paid.
The short versionMost disputes in this market are not about features. They are about what was charged extra, how long the move actually took, and what happened to the data when somebody wanted to leave. Get those three in writing before the demo impresses anybody.
1. If we leave in three years, how do we get our data out
A good answer names formats and a timeline: CSV or Excel for every table, documents and photographs as files, and a date by which it lands, with no separate charge. A weak answer is “we will export it for you”, because that is a promise made by a salesperson about work a support team will price later. Ask whether you can pull your own export today, without asking anybody.
2. Who owns the data while the contract runs
The contract should say the institution owns its records and the vendor is processing them on your instruction. Read what it says about using your data to train anything, and about what happens on the day the subscription lapses — a good agreement keeps your data readable for a stated notice period, a weak one goes quiet about it. If the vendor will not put ownership in one plain sentence, that silence is the answer.
3. Is the price per student or per login
These behave completely differently as you grow. Meritto's published plans cap users at 15, 25 and 50 (meritto.com/packages-pricing, checked 18 September 2026), while Fedena's plans state unlimited users (fedena.com/pricing-and-plans, checked 18 September 2026). If the price moves with logins, count your teachers, clerks, lab staff and drivers honestly, then ask what next year costs when you add a section.
4. What is charged extra
Ask the question as a list, not as a yes or no: the parent app, the student app, the teacher app, upgrades, support tickets, additional reports, extra training, and messages. OpenEduCat, for example, prices its mobile apps as separate annual add-ons at $889 for Android and $1,179 for iOS, and its WhatsApp module at $499 a year (openeducat.org/pricing, checked 18 September 2026) — all published, all honest, and all easy to miss if you only read the headline price. A weak answer is a single number with no line items behind it.
5. Who does the migration, and what does it cost
You want a named party, a scope and a figure: who cleans the old data, who maps the fields, who checks the opening fee balances, and what it costs if your records are messier than expected. A good vendor asks to see a sample export before quoting. A weak one says migration is included and discovers three months later that your old system has two students with the same admission number.
6. How long until we go live, and what does that mean
Go-live is a word with several meanings, so ask which modules are live on that date and which follow. Meritto, Teachmint and MyClassboard publish no implementation timeline on their websites (checked 18 September 2026), so this is a question you will have to ask out loud. Make sure the answer is tied to your session calendar — nobody should be switching a fee counter over in the middle of the admission rush.
7. What happens in admission season when your support desk is busy
Every vendor is responsive in October. Ask what happens in the third week of admissions, when every school on their list is calling at once: how many people are on the desk, what hours, which channel, and what counts as an emergency. Meritto states that dedicated customer success is included in every subscription (meritto.com/packages-pricing, checked 18 September 2026); most vendors say less than that, and no vendor site we opened publishes a response time (checked 18 September 2026). Ask for one in the contract.
8. Can it produce our NAAC or NBA evidence and our university returns
This is where marketing and product usually separate. Across the products we checked for these comparisons, almost none names NAAC, NBA or NIRF as a product capability: Skolaro names AICTE, UGC and NAAC reporting on its college page (skolaro.com/college-erp, checked 18 September 2026), Vidyalaya writes about NAAC in blog articles but not on its product pages (checked 18 September 2026), and the others we could open do not mention them at all. Ask to see a criterion-wise report generated from live data, not a slide about it.
9. What do you do about APAAR, ABC and DigiLocker
APAAR and the Academic Bank of Credits are not named as a product feature on any of the other products' sites we were able to open (checked 18 September 2026), and DigiLocker appeared on only one of them — Meritto publishes it as a featured integration for fetching pre-verified documents (meritto.com, checked 18 September 2026). A good answer explains how the ID is recorded, how consent is taken, and what happens when a parent refuses. A weak answer is that it is on the roadmap.
10. Under the DPDP Act, who is the Data Fiduciary and what are you
The institution is the Data Fiduciary for its students' data; the vendor is processing it for you. A vendor who knows this will tell you where the data is stored, who on their side can see it, how access is controlled, and what they do if there is a breach. Meritto names AWS but states no Indian data residency, and Teachmint and MyClassboard say nothing about where the data sits (checked 18 September 2026), so ask, and get the answer into the agreement rather than the brochure. Our own note on what DPDP means for a school sets out the duties that stay with you whatever the software does.
11. Are your WhatsApp and SMS properly registered
Bulk SMS to Indian numbers runs through DLT registration of the sender ID and the message templates; WhatsApp needs an approved business sender and approved templates. None of the vendor sites we were able to open names DLT registration, although several sell SMS (checked 18 September 2026). Ask who registers the templates, how long approval takes, and what the per-message cost is, because a fee reminder that does not go out on the 5th is a collection problem, not an IT problem.
12. What does the teacher app do when the network is down
Ask them to switch off the Wi-Fi on the demo phone and mark attendance. A good app records it on the device and syncs when the signal returns; a weak one shows a spinner and loses the period. The same question applies to the fee counter during a power cut and to a hostel warden in a basement, so ask it once for each place where somebody types under pressure.
Ask us the same twelve
iVake publishes its own answers rather than saving them for a meeting. The rates, the add-ons, the ₹10,000 onboarding, GST and what is never charged extra are on the pricing page. Hosting, access control and data export in open formats whenever you ask are on the security page. Migration, training and the four-week go-live for a school or single college — six to eight weeks for a group or a university — are on the implementation page.
Two things we will say plainly while you are holding the list. iVake is not open source and there is no on-premise version, so an institution that wants to run and modify the software itself should look elsewhere. And iVake has no third-party ratings or review counts yet, because it is new under this name. Put both on the sheet next to everyone else's answers, and put these twelve questions to us exactly as you put them to the others.
Sources
- Meritto packages and pricing — user caps and customer success, checked 18 September 2026
- Meritto homepage — DigiLocker as a featured integration, checked 18 September 2026
- Fedena pricing and plans — unlimited users, checked 18 September 2026
- OpenEduCat pricing — mobile apps and WhatsApp priced separately, checked 18 September 2026
- Skolaro college ERP — AICTE, UGC and NAAC reporting, checked 18 September 2026
- Vidyalaya school ERP modules — no NAAC module on the product page, checked 18 September 2026
- MyClassboard — no implementation timeline published, checked 18 September 2026
- Teachmint — no implementation timeline published, checked 18 September 2026
- iVake pricing, in rupees, with GST and onboarding shown
- iVake implementation, migration and go-live
See iVake running on your own data
Share your fee structure and programmes before the call, or sample data with student names removed. We set them up, so you see your own institution on screen rather than a demo account.
- 45 minutes, your data. Not a generic tour of features.
- Migration mapped on the call. We show exactly where your current records land.
- A written rollout plan within two working days, with phases, owners and dates.
- No pressure to switch everything at once. Most schools and colleges start with one department or one intake.