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Fourth, ask about price increases over the life of the contract. Is any annual increase capped, and is it tied to a transparent measure such as inflation, or left at the vendor's discretion? An uncapped renewal clause is one of the more common sources of budget surprise for school business managers a few years into a contract.

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Use a modular provider as your benchmark. Compass Education offers a wide module range, so you can map each requirement to a named function and see whether a platform covers it natively or relies on bolt-ons. Build a simple scoring grid: list your must-have features down one side, score each provider from one to five, and weight the categories that matter most to your setting. A large primary and a small independent will weight them differently, and that is the point.

Procurement in the government and Catholic school sectors comes with obligations that a generic feature list will not capture. Before comparing any school management information system, set out the sector requirements you must meet, then judge each provider against them.

Start with administrative workload. A good MIS should cut duplicate data entry, automate attendance registers and bring reporting into one place. Ask each provider to show how many clicks a routine task takes, because that number adds up across a full term. Time-poor office staff feel the difference between a system that fits their day and one that fights it.