Tools
Build the business case with your own numbers
Four administrative tasks, your own figures, and reductions you set yourself. The assumptions are visible and editable, because a board paper built on a vendor's hidden multiplier does not survive its first question.
Your school
Current enrolment across all campuses you would run on one platform.
New students enrolled in a normal year, including mid-year joiners.
Fully loaded hourly cost for office and finance staff, in your own currency. Used only as a multiplier, so the currency is whatever you enter.
From accepted offer to the student existing correctly in your records, fee ledger, and class list. Count re-keying between systems.
Time spent identifying who has not paid, contacting families, and reconciling receipts across systems.
Total staff time collecting marks, aggregating, generating, and correcting report cards for one cycle.
How many times a year you issue report cards.
Calls and messages asking what a balance is, whether a payment landed, or what a mark was. Count only those a portal could answer.
Average handling time including looking the answer up.
Your assumptions about how much each task reduces
These start conservative. Change them to whatever you actually believe, including to zero.
Based on admissions per year × minutes of admin per admission. The reduction here comes from not re-keying an accepted applicant into a student record, a fee ledger, and a class list separately. It does not touch the parts of admissions that are conversation and judgement, which is why the default is well under half.
Based on hours per month on fee follow-up × 12. A defaulter view over one ledger removes the identification and reconciliation work. It does not remove the conversation with a family who cannot pay, which is most of the difficulty and none of the software.
Based on hours per cycle × cycles per year. Aggregation and generation compress considerably when marks already sit against the roster. Writing comments does not compress at all, and comments are a large share of the total, so the default is modest.
Based on enquiries per week × minutes per enquiry × 40 weeks. Balance, payment, and mark enquiries are what a portal answers directly, and this is where schools report the sharpest change. It assumes families actually adopt the portal, which depends on the data being right when it opens.
Method
How this calculates, and what it leaves out
Worth reading before you put the output in front of anyone, because the questions below are the ones a finance committee asks.
Every input is something you already know
There is no industry benchmark in this calculator and no figure supplied by us about your school. Enrolment, admissions volume, staff hourly cost, and the time your team currently spends on four specific tasks are all yours. If you do not know one of them, that is worth finding out before you buy any platform, because it is the number the business case rests on.
The reductions are assumptions, and you can change them
Each task has a default reduction we consider conservative, with the reasoning stated next to it. They are assumptions, not measurements: we hold no permissioned before-and-after study from a school to cite, and a calculator that presented modelled figures as evidence would be exactly the thing this page is trying not to be. Move them to whatever you actually believe, including to zero.
Only four tasks, deliberately
Admissions data entry, fee follow-up, report card production, and parent status enquiries. These are the four where the mechanism of the saving is clear enough to defend in a budget meeting. Adding more categories would inflate the total and weaken the argument, because someone will ask how each one works.
The output is hours first
Hours are the honest unit, because they are what actually changes. The cost figure is hours multiplied by the hourly rate you entered, in whatever currency you entered it, so it carries no assumption of ours about salaries in your country. The full-time-equivalent figure exists only to express scale.
What it deliberately excludes
Licence cost, implementation, your own staff time during migration, and payment gateway onboarding are all real and none of them are in here, because they vary by scope and we would rather quote them than model them. Treat the output as the benefit side only, and put it against a quote rather than against zero.
The arithmetic
Every formula, stated
Where a constant is used, it is named. There are two: a school year of 40 weeks for parent enquiries, and 1,800 working hours for the full-time-equivalent figure.
Admissions data entry
Current cost: Admissions per year × minutes of admin per admission
Default reduction 40%: The reduction here comes from not re-keying an accepted applicant into a student record, a fee ledger, and a class list separately. It does not touch the parts of admissions that are conversation and judgement, which is why the default is well under half.
Fee follow-up and reconciliation
Current cost: Hours per month on fee follow-up × 12
Default reduction 35%: A defaulter view over one ledger removes the identification and reconciliation work. It does not remove the conversation with a family who cannot pay, which is most of the difficulty and none of the software.
Report card production
Current cost: Hours per cycle × cycles per year
Default reduction 30%: Aggregation and generation compress considerably when marks already sit against the roster. Writing comments does not compress at all, and comments are a large share of the total, so the default is modest.
Parent status enquiries
Current cost: Enquiries per week × minutes per enquiry × 40 weeks
Default reduction 50%: Balance, payment, and mark enquiries are what a portal answers directly, and this is where schools report the sharpest change. It assumes families actually adopt the portal, which depends on the data being right when it opens.
What each input means
- Enrolled students (students)
- Current enrolment across all campuses you would run on one platform.
- Admissions per year (admissions)
- New students enrolled in a normal year, including mid-year joiners.
- Administrative staff cost per hour (per hour)
- Fully loaded hourly cost for office and finance staff, in your own currency. Used only as a multiplier, so the currency is whatever you enter.
- Minutes of admin per admission today (minutes)
- From accepted offer to the student existing correctly in your records, fee ledger, and class list. Count re-keying between systems.
- Hours per month on fee follow-up (hours / month)
- Time spent identifying who has not paid, contacting families, and reconciling receipts across systems.
- Hours per reporting cycle on report cards (hours / cycle)
- Total staff time collecting marks, aggregating, generating, and correcting report cards for one cycle.
- Reporting cycles per year (cycles)
- How many times a year you issue report cards.
- Parent status enquiries per week (enquiries / week)
- Calls and messages asking what a balance is, whether a payment landed, or what a mark was. Count only those a portal could answer.
- Minutes per enquiry (minutes)
- Average handling time including looking the answer up.
Calculator questions
Whether these are measurements, why cost is excluded, and what a small result tells you.
Are these savings figures you have measured?+
No. The default reductions are assumptions we consider conservative, with the reasoning shown next to each one, and they are editable precisely because they are assumptions. We hold no permissioned before-and-after study from a school, and presenting a model as a measurement would undermine the only thing this page is for.
Why does the calculator not include the software cost?+
Because the cost depends on scope, student count, and implementation effort, and inventing a figure to subtract would make the result look precise while making it wrong. Take the hours and the cost this produces, get a quote for your actual scope, and compare the two yourself.
Which input matters most?+
Usually parent status enquiries, because the volume is high and the per-enquiry time is underestimated. Schools consistently guess low here. Count them for one week before filling this in and the number will change.
Our numbers come out small. Does that mean we should not change platform?+
It means the case for changing is not primarily about administrative hours, which is worth knowing. Some schools change platform for data integrity, family experience, or because the current system cannot express their curriculum, and none of those appear in this calculator. A small number here is information, not a verdict.
Can we use this in a board paper?+
That is what it is for. Show the inputs and the reductions alongside the result rather than the result alone, because a board that can see the assumptions can argue with them, and a figure they have argued with is one they will stand behind.
Does the calculator send our numbers anywhere?+
No. It runs in your browser. Nothing is submitted, stored, or used to contact you, and there is no gate in front of the result.
Put this against a real quote
Bring your student count, campus count, and phase-one modules, and we will scope the other side of the comparison.
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