School Management Planner

The problem

"Build me a school management system" is a prompt that reliably goes wrong. Your agent generates modules (attendance, grades, fees, parent portal) and ships something that looks complete. Then you try to run it for a school:

• A teacher has to go through three separate menus to mark attendance.
• Parent contacts are stored as one plain text field.
• The fee ledger knows nothing about installments or concessions.
• Annual student promotion is missing.
• The data you imported last month logged no validation errors. It corrupted your records without telling you.

Real school systems fail at these same points. On r/k12sysadmin, people who run school IT describe SIS migrations where guardian data landed in the wrong contact model and broke reports. Implementation guides from OpenEduCat, Gradelink and SchoolCues all treat data migration as its own project phase. Capterra reviews of PowerSchool and Infinite Campus are full of complaints about daily tasks that take many clicks, reports that do not match what the school needs, and integration gaps that cost thousands in add-on fees.

This planner records what real school systems do, and what makes them fail, before your agent writes any code.

What it is built from

The planner is based on a feature inventory built from 46 real sources: 18 live commercial products (Fedena, PowerSchool, Classter, Gradelink, SchoolCues, Skolaro and 12 others), 13 open-source and developer-visible systems (openSIS, Frappe Education, Academico and more), 10 CodeCanyon and template marketplace products, and 5 market and community sources, including Reddit threads from people who work in school IT.

Every recommendation cites an INV-* reference that shows which kinds of source support it. The planner can say that the admin portal is CORE and appears in 38 of 46 surveyed sources across all four kinds of source, or that fee structure management was observed in 35 of 46. Your agent works from that frequency table and cannot invent it. Every include, defer or skip decision goes back to the table. A generic prompt cannot do this unless the research is repeated.

The planner also holds 13 pain points from that research, including data migration, messy guardian records, too many clicks in navigation, reporting gaps, what parents expect on mobile, and security and vendor access. Every blueprint must take them into account. A spec that ignores them is rejected.

What you get

A discovery planner that works in phases and at three depths: Basic for a fast first build, Moderate for a real client with one school, and Advanced for SaaS, school chains or ERP replacements. It covers six kinds of institution: K-12 private, government/public, coaching center, college, online academy and boarding school. Each kind has its own vocabulary, so the agent never puts K-12 language into a spec for a coaching center.

The planner makes you decide include, defer or skip for 80-plus features before any code runs. Every feature cites its INV-* evidence row. The output is a complete blueprint your agent can build from: decision list, role and permission matrix, data model with entities scoped to the institution, portal and screen map for each role, workflow acceptance checks, go-live checklist, and a plan for the modules you deferred.

A forbidden-family scan runs before the spec is written. If a module was deferred, every synonym and child entity is removed from roles, data model, screens, workflows, phases and acceptance tests.

Three complete school systems were built from this planner, each by a different build method and each covering admissions through fees. They run as live demos you can log into from this page.

The Lifecycle build, a complete school system from admissions through fees, built from this planner. You can log into it from the demos below.

What it covers

Phase 0 locks the First Delivery depth and the school type before any questions are asked.

Phase 1 is a structured set of discovery questions covering product model, institution type, number of campuses, portal selection, fee model, academic model, assessment model, optional ERP modules (transport, hostel, library, HR), communication channels, hosting and stack, jurisdiction and rules for sensitive records, and non-teaching staff roles.

Phase 2 runs a checklist of 80-plus cited modules across 13 feature families: foundation setup, user portals and RBAC, admissions, student information, attendance, timetable and calendar, curriculum and homework, exams and results, fees and finance, communication, optional ERP operations, safety and front office, and reports and integrations. Every row cites its INV-* reference.

Phase 3 and 4 add open questions and a dedicated check on your pain points: current failures, data quality, reports you cannot do without, existing integrations, training capacity, the mobile workflow for parents, and security requirements. Your answers override the generic feature defaults.

Phase 5 turns the selected modules into role dashboards, a full screen map, a spec for the mobile parent portal, workflow acceptance checks, and a go-live and onboarding sequence. That sequence includes a setup wizard, an import center, a sample data mode, onboarding checklists per role, and a structured go-live checklist with Fix/Review links to every blocking item.

Phase 6 writes the final blueprint for your agent, with a consistency audit, a forbidden-family scan and a handover audit that must pass before the project can be called done.