What To Look For When Choosing A School Management Software Program

School management software is changing the face of how educational institutions keep their team of faculty, students, and families in sync in this ever-changing Age of Information. If your organization is interested in implementing this exciting new technology, then you will first have to sort through all of the market offerings. Here is a guide to what to look for when choosing a school management software program:

Inclusion

It’s important that your school management software of choice caters to every member of the education community. In this sense, inclusion for teachers, school administrators, students, and parents is a necessity. There are many different people involved in any one child’s education, and they should all be able to share and access information through the software interface.

Interface

Because there will be so many people using your software–many of them being less than tech-savvy–the program interface should be relatively easy to use and navigate. When shopping around for the right solution for your school’s needs, be sure to consider the functionality of the user interface. Test any and all software that you can (most reputable software developers offer free, limited-time trial versions of their products), like Fedena, and ask for feedback from school staff, students, parents, and even visitors. To learn more about a program’s interface without undergoing a trial period, you can also search the web for user reviews.

Reporting

Your software program should be robust enough to provide detailed reports on a wide array of data types, and fast. For example, if you want to know your school’s statistics when it comes to enrollment, grades, billing, attendance, extracurricular activities, transportation, department changes, faculty shifts, funding, new pupil registrations, or even library usage, then your school management software should provide you with the means to produce timely and accurate reports of that information.

Customer Service and Tech Support

It doesn’t matter how great a school management software program is if you can’t get through to a customer service agent when you need to. Of course, this also applies to tech support. Before you invest in any particular program, put in a few calls to each department to verify that a) your calls are promptly answered, and b) the people on the other end of the line are friendly, knowledgeable, and willing to put the necessary time into helping you reach an acceptable resolution to your issue.

School management software is an extremely broad-based application that must be functional and easily usable in a vast array of education-related tasks. Therefore, your assessment of all the programs available to you should be thorough and comprehensive. When sizing up all of your options, be sure to keep these important guidelines in mind.

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