How ERP for Education Will Help Improve Your Academic Institution

Sharing the joy and success of students on graduation day is a wonderful experience.

Often, we only see the triumphant students and forget the vast input needed to get them there.

The truth is that educating students requires tremendous effort, resources, and time. There are many processes and departments needed for the smooth running of an educational establishment.

The masses of data generated from these departments can become unwieldy and overwhelming.

So how can a cloud-based education ERP help you keep on top of fees, admissions, student grades, and procurement of materials amongst your many other tasks??

What is education ERP and how can it help your institution?

An ERP is a fully integrated software solution that enables you to manage all processes and operations required for your educational establishment under one roof.

The basis of an education ERP are modules that are designed with specific functionalities tailored to complete the tasks of each department.

What makes ERP so special is that these modules are connected to a single source of truth so that data is always current and can be trusted.

You will also learn how these modules effortlessly integrate with one another, giving you invaluable insights and reports on the efficiency and overall health of your institution.

Effective student management for educational institutions

An education ERP will allow you to manage the entire student experience (from student admissions to graduation) through a series of modules.

Here are a few ways education ERP can help optimize your internal processes:

Enrollment and admissions

You can help students from all over the world apply directly to your institution no matter where they are.

An education ERP makes it easy for students by letting them apply online.

These web forms (created for online applications) are fully customizable with industry-specific data fields that you can decide to include or not based on your preferences.

With this advanced functionality, you can create multiple application web forms for any of the different courses that you offer.

Admission documents are automatically generated by the system

Once a student’s application has been received, the ERP system will automatically check eligibility (as per the criteria fed into the system) and generate acceptance or rejection letters with a simple command saving your staff valuable time.

Recording student attendance is made easy

Tracking student attendance is crucial. Good attendance leads to better learning and improved student outcomes.

With education ERP, faculty can:

• Simply mark out students who are absent (the system will automatically identify the other students as being present for class)
• Generate customized reports to study attendance data for different groups of students, faculty, courses, time periods, and so on.

Finance and accounts for education establishments

The financial health of your educational institution is crucial. With so many different financial operations to manage, specially designed modules will help you with

• Budgeting
• Accounting
• Purchasing & payroll
• Track revenues and expenses
• Track payment of fees
• Invoicing

Collecting student fees

Tracking and chasing outstanding and defaulting student fees can be very costly and time-consuming.

With ERP for education, schools can

• Set fee payment schedules - Once in place the full fee amounts and their due dates are automatically applied to each student. This eliminates manual data entry and reduces costly errors due to incorrect data entry.
• Create as many fee structures as you need - Schools can specify tuition, course, or exam fees with their own individual price points. Or create any other type of fee categories that they require.
• Automatic reports on outstanding fees and defaulters - Because all fee related information is recorded in one system, administrators will no longer need to chase outstanding fees saving significant amounts of time.
• Streamlined accounting systems to pay third party providers - An education institution will have a number of third party vendors supplying anything from stationery to student transportation. Education ERP can automatically make payments to third party vendors in a timely manner.
• Effortlessly integrate secure payment gateways - ERP has the capability to integrate secure and trusted payment gateways. You can ensure data security and peace of mind for parents who are paying fees from their mobile phones or any other devices.

The benefits of education ERP for teachers and instructors

Efficiently track students’ progress

Teachers need to grade and manage test scores of hundreds of students enrolled in multiple courses.?Manually recording these test scores can be laborious and draining. With ERP systems, these can be easily input into the system. The system also has the ability to fetch scores to create progress reports and report cards. The system can also analyze trends seen in performance according to categories like class, section, subject, faculty, and so on.

Automated student progress reports for parents

As seen earlier, ERP modules can create/ update report cards with a few clicks.

With automatically updated report cards, details of students’ academic progress can be regularly sent to/ accessed by parents, keeping them fully informed.

Integration to LMS (Learning Management Systems)

ERPs can be easily integrated with learning management systems which allow teachers to access lesson plans, integrate student attendance data, link time-tables to online classrooms, and so on. It facilitates online teaching-learning to happen seamlessly and automatically updates relevant information and data.?

With all these administrative processes automated and streamlined, teachers are free to focus solely on teaching their students and improving student performance.

In conclusion, it is crucial that any education ERP you choose must do the following:

• Streamline your enrolment and application processes
• Provide a comprehensive solution to manage all of your accounting and financial activities
• Automatically track students’ progress
• Ensure that your data is complete, accurate, updated, and accessible to those who need it
• Give you accurate and real-time insights and reports about the status and health of your education establishment so you can plan effectively and focus on your core function- imparting quality education