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Custom software for educational institutions: enrollment, tuition and grades in one system

Management software for educational institutions brings together in one place what today is scattered across spreadsheets, WhatsApp and the front desk: applications and enrollment, tuition billing and collections, grades and report cards, communication with families and certificates. We build it around your school, institute or training center, integrated with your payment gateway and the systems you already use. And if your institution is like many others and a subscription product is enough, we’ll tell you so in the assessment.

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30-minute assessment, free and with no commitment · Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. and 2:00–5:00 p.m.

Students talk in a university lecture hall with wooden desks, laptops and an open book on the table
What we see in the sector

What problems does management software solve for educational institutions?

Information is rarely what’s missing. What’s missing is having it in one place. These are the symptoms we see most often, and if your team recognizes three or more, the problem isn’t people: it’s the system.

Enrollment means standing in line

Paper forms, photocopies of documents and an office that types everything in again. During enrollment season the office is overwhelmed right when the most new families arrive.

Collections are chased by hand

Tuition, installments and payment plans are reconciled against the bank statement, and the payment reminder depends on someone remembering to send it.

Grades go through three files before the report card

Each teacher on their own spreadsheet, the academic coordinator consolidating and the registrar’s office putting together the report with the institution’s grading scale.

Families ask on personal WhatsApp

Notices, meeting requests, account statements and requests land on the staff’s phones, with no record and no timely reply.

A certificate takes days

Enrollment letters, transcripts or course attendance certificates are put together in Word, signed and scanned.

Reports to the Ministry are prepared separately

The information that SIMAT, SIET or SNIES (Colombia’s Ministry of Education information systems) require is consolidated again by hand, because the internal system doesn’t hold it the way it’s needed.

By type of institution

What does each type of institution need?

A school and a corporate training center aren’t run the same way, and software that works for one can get in the way of the other. This is what usually matters most in each case:

  • Private schools: annual enrollment with each student’s documents, monthly tuition at the rates approved for the year, report cards per term with the national scale and the equivalence to your institution’s own assessment system, constant communication with parents and guardians, and reporting enrollment in SIMAT. With extra care: most of their students are minors.
  • Vocational training institutions (ETDH in Colombia): institutions with an operating license and programs registered in SIET, cohorts starting on different dates, adult students paying in installments and certificates of occupational competence that must be issued without errors. The challenge is usually the calendar: several groups open at once, each with its own rhythm of payments and grades.
  • Universities and continuing education: core academic management is usually handled by a large system. What’s left out are the certificate programs, short courses and seminars that are sold to the public, paid online and certified, and that don’t fit the semester calendar. That’s where custom development connects without replacing anything.
  • Corporate training centers and academies: training bought by the calendar. The customer needs to see the schedule, dates and price before signing up, pay with or without a card and receive their certificate at the end. In language, music, test-prep or technical academies, sales and academic operations are the same problem.
The honest question

Subscription or custom software? When each one makes sense

A subscription product makes sense if your institution works like many others —a school with regular terms, report cards in the usual format— and you’d rather pay a monthly fee than run a project. There are several mature products for schools, and if that’s your case we’ll tell you.

Custom software makes sense when:

  • Your model doesn’t fit the product: cohorts starting every month, programs sold to the public, certifications with their own rules.
  • You already tried a platform and your team still keeps collections or grades in Excel on the side.
  • You need the system to talk to yours: your payment gateway, your CRM or your accounting, not the ones the product comes with.
  • You want the code and the data to be yours: in a project we build, they are, with documentation and a formal handover.

There’s also a middle path: the classroom in an LMS you already have and, built custom, the sales, enrollment and billing around it. And if you choose your own development, someone has to maintain the server, the backups and the updates: our managed hosting covers that.

What we build

What we build for an educational institution

Depending on what your institution needs, the system can include these modules. If what you’re after is mainly the classroom —content, assignments, assessments and online certification—, the starting point is our virtual learning platform.

01

Admissions, applications and online enrollment

The applicant, the student or the guardian fills in the details, uploads the documents, accepts the data processing authorization and is enrolled without going to the front desk.

02

Billing, installments and collections

Online payments, installment plans, automatic reminders and each family’s account statement in view of the finance office.

03

Grades, report cards and certificates

Grade entry by teacher, report cards with your institution’s scale and certificates generated when the student meets the requirements.

04

Portal for students and families

Grades, payments, notices and documents behind a single login, from the phone. With reports for leadership: enrollment, revenue collected and outstanding balances per term, without waiting for someone to consolidate a file.

05

A website that sells your programs

When the institution sells open enrollment training: catalog, program page and payment in the same flow. That’s our web design and development service.

06

A WhatsApp assistant for families and applicants, with every case logged

If what overwhelms you are questions and requests via WhatsApp, email and phone, Support 360 solves that: an assistant answers with what the institution has already published and cites the source, whatever it doesn’t know goes to a person, and every case gets a tracking number and an alert before its deadline expires.

Integrations

What systems does it integrate with?

A management system that doesn’t talk to the others creates yet another file someone has to reconcile. We’ve already put the first three integrations into production in training and events projects; the rest are reviewed in the assessment, case by case, before promising anything.

Payments

On Grupo Élite’s website, buying a course is paid through PayU, with a financing option; ticketing for the Congreso de Líderes charges through Stripe.

  • PayU
  • Card
  • PSE
  • Baloto
  • Efecty
  • Stripe

CRM

Grupo Élite’s forms go straight to its CRM, so sales sees every lead without copying data.

  • Kommo

Courses and commerce on WordPress

To publish courses, change prices and open new intakes without depending on us.

  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • LMS on WordPress

Invoicing, email and virtual classroom: reviewed in the assessment

If your institution issues electronic invoices, signs in with institutional accounts or already has a virtual classroom, we review what can be connected. For official reports, the system can be designed to store the data in the structure each one requires, so preparing them doesn’t mean typing everything again.

  • Electronic invoicing with your accounting software
  • Google Workspace
  • Microsoft 365
  • Moodle or another LMS
  • SIMAT, SIET and SNIES reports

We have no commercial partnership with any of these providers, and we don’t build direct connections to the Ministry’s systems. If your institution uses a system that isn’t on this list, it’s reviewed before committing.

Regulations

What regulations affect how an educational institution is run? The case of Colombia

In Colombia, each type of institution reports to a different Ministry of Education information system: schools register preschool, primary and secondary enrollment in SIMAT; vocational training institutions (education for work and human development) register licensed institutions and programs in SIET, through their local education department; and higher education reports to SNIES. A well-designed system can store the data so that preparing those reports doesn’t require retyping it.

In primary and secondary education, Decree 1290 of 2009, now compiled in Decree 1075 of 2015, sets the national grading scale —Superior, Alto, Básico and Bajo— and lets each institution define its own assessment system. That’s why report cards are configured with your institution’s scale and equivalence, not with a template.

Law 1581 of 2012 protects personal data and gives heightened protection to that of children and adolescents. In the system, this translates into design decisions: who sees what information according to their role, with what authorization from the parent or guardian and where it’s stored.

We describe the general framework to explain how the system is designed; this is not legal advice. Your institution’s specific obligations are defined by your education department and your legal advisor.

How we work

How do we work with an educational institution?

  1. 01

    30-minute assessment, free of charge

    You tell us where your team’s time goes and we tell you whether a product, a custom build or a combination is right for you.

  2. 02

    Process mapping

    Before proposing screens we talk to the people who do the work today: the registrar’s office, the finance office, the academic coordinators. The right software comes from the real process. The proposal, with scope, investment and delivery date, is put in writing before we start.

  3. 03

    Built in increments

    You test working progress in your browser throughout the project, not a document at the end.

  4. 04

    Verified migration and go-live

    Students, grades and historical records move to the new system and are verified with your registrar’s office before the switch, with go-live planned around your academic calendar.

  5. 05

    Training, support and evolution

    Your staff and teachers learn to use it without needing a technical background, and the code and the data are yours. The academic calendar changes every year, and the system changes with it.

Real projects

Training projects already running on systems we built

The cases we can show today are in corporate training, certification and training events. If your institution is a school or a university, we’ll say it up front: what we do carry over from these projects is the part that hurts most in any institution, selling, enrolling, billing and certifying without paperwork.

Grupo Élite website and learning platform
Grupo Élite

A website that sells and a platform that teaches

Grupo Élite trains, advises and audits management systems in Colombia and Peru. We redesigned Grupo Élite’s website and developed its learning platform to separate two businesses that were getting in each other’s way: the website sells —catalog of courses and certificate programs, a page with schedule and payment through PayU— and the learning platform teaches: enrollment, classrooms, instructors and certification at the end of the program.

See the project: Grupo Élite
ICSER online certification platform on a computer, tablet and phone
ICSER

Online certifications for students in several countries

ICSER Consultoría sells certifications with a small administrative team. We built ICSER’s certification platform: online courses and certifications, integrated payments, access from any device and training for their team.

See the project: ICSER

The track-record figures that Grupo Élite and the Congreso de Líderes publish on their own websites are theirs, not a result of these projects, and that’s why they aren’t cited here. See the full portfolio.

Related services

Services that apply to your institution

E-learning platforms

The online classroom: content, assessments, enrollment and certificates, with your brand and your educational model.

Explore the service

Custom software

Enrollment, collections, grades, report cards and family portal, connected to your payment gateway and your accounting.

Explore the service

Web development

The website that presents the institution and sells its programs, fast on mobile and built for Google.

Explore the service

Hosting and cloud

Server, backups and system updates, managed by us.

Explore the service

IT support

Help desk and maintenance for computer labs and administrative equipment.

Explore the service
Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions from educational institutions

What is school management software, and how is it different from a virtual learning platform?

School management software runs the institution: applications, enrollment, billing, collections, official grades, report cards and certificates. The virtual platform or LMS is where teaching happens: content, assignments and assessments. Many institutions need both, and the two can be connected.

How much does custom software for an educational institution cost?

It depends on how many processes it covers (enrollment, collections, grades, family portal, certificates), on the integrations and on whether data is migrated from a previous system. That’s why the investment is put in writing in the proposal, after a free assessment.

Can families complete enrollment without coming to the school?

Yes. The guardian fills in the details from a phone or computer, uploads the documents, accepts the data processing authorization and pays online; the registrar’s office reviews what comes in instead of typing it. Online enrollment already runs on the platform we developed for Grupo Élite.

Can an assistant answer families and applicants on WhatsApp?

Yes. With Support 360, the assistant answers with the information the institution approved —dates, requirements, published fees— and cites where it comes from; whatever it can’t back up, or anything about a particular case, goes to a person along with the full conversation. Since many students are minors, what data is requested through that channel and who sees it is defined with you from the design stage.

How is the data of students who are minors protected?

In Colombia, Law 1581 of 2012 gives heightened protection to the data of children and adolescents. In the system, this translates into role-based permissions, so each person sees only what their role requires, and into the guardian’s authorization recorded at enrollment. Where the data is hosted is decided with you from the design stage.

Do you work with schools or only with corporate training?

The cases we can show today are in corporate training, certification and training events. The underlying problems —enrollment, billing, grades and certificates— are the same in a school, and in the assessment we tell you frankly whether your case is something we solve or something a product on the market does.

Where is your administrative team’s time going?

Let’s start there. We build custom software and learning platforms for educational institutions. Book a 30-minute assessment, free and with no commitment, and we’ll review it against your real process, even if the answer is a product that already exists.

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