Mumbai’s schools are older, denser and more varied in funding status than schools in most Indian cities. A single trust in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region can be running an aided Marathi-medium school established decades ago, an unaided English-medium CBSE school, and a newer campus in Thane or Navi Mumbai — three institutions with three different fee regimes and one board of trustees answerable for all of them.
Software chosen for one of those three usually fits the other two badly. This page is about choosing for the set.
Aided, unaided and permanently unaided are three different regimes
The Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Fee) Act, 2011 (Mah. VII of 2014) does not treat all schools alike.
- For government and aided schools, fee regulation rests with the government. The Bombay High Court read Section 5 that way in June 2020 when it stayed a state resolution that sought to bar fee increases in private unaided schools.
- For private unaided and permanently unaided schools, Section 6 makes the management competent to propose the fee — subject to approval by the Parent-Teacher Association Executive Committee, and to the fifteen per cent and two-year constraints introduced by the Amendment Act of 2018 (Maharashtra Act No. XXVIII of 2019, published 26 August 2019).
If your trust holds schools in more than one category, your system needs to keep their fee structures, approvals and audit trails genuinely separate. A single fee master with a “school” dropdown will produce a report that mixes a regulated aided school with an unaided one — which is exactly the report you do not want in front of a committee.
One trust, several campuses, one set of books
Multi-campus is the requirement Mumbai trusts most often get wrong at purchase, because every vendor says yes to it.
Ask these instead:
- Is each campus’s data isolated, or is it a column in a shared table? Isolation matters when one campus is audited, when one campus leaves the trust, and when a user account should have access to one campus only.
- Can a user belong to one campus but not another? Test it with a real accountant login.
- Does the trust-level view derive from campus data, or is it maintained separately? If it is maintained separately, it will be wrong within a term.
- Can each campus keep its own academic calendar, fee heads and grading system? An aided Marathi-medium school and an unaided CBSE school will not share any of the three.
EdunodeX gives each school its own database schema and its own subdomain, with the trust-level view built from those rather than replacing them.
The Executive Committee has a parent majority by law
The 2018 amendment set the Parent-Teacher Association Executive Committee at a minimum of one and a maximum of two parents per standard, capped at thirteen parents; one teacher per standard, capped at ten teachers; and one management representative. The parent members must always outnumber the teacher members plus the management representative by one, and where two parents came from a standard in one year, only one may come from that standard the next.
This is worth internalising before a fee cycle rather than during one. The committee that approves your fee is, by statute, a body in which parents hold a majority — and it will read the heads you levy, not the total.
Section 6(4) as substituted also matters when a proposal is contested: pending a decision by the Divisional Fee Regulatory Committee, the management may collect the previous year’s fee plus fifteen per cent or the proposed increased fee, whichever is less, and no penal interest is recoverable from parents if the finally decided fee turns out to be higher.
Declaring a fee structure at admission
Section 6(1A) gives Mumbai schools an option many do not use: declare the standard-wise fee structure at the time of admission, for Standards 1 to 10 in full, or in two parts — 1 to 5 and 6 to 10 — with the second part declared at least one year before it begins. A declared structure is binding on all concerned, and must be displayed on the notice board and on the school’s official website.
For a school with predictable costs this converts an annual negotiation into a one-time publication. It also puts an operational requirement on your software: the declared structure has to be reproducible, per standard, years after it was declared, for a cohort that has since moved up several classes. A system that overwrites fee plans each year cannot do this.
Communication in a city that reads three scripts
Mumbai households read Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu and English in various combinations, and a school circular that only exists in English reaches a fraction of the parents it names.
The practical approach is to separate two things. The staff console can reasonably be in one or two languages, because staff are trained on it. Parent-facing messages should meet the parent where they are. In EdunodeX, WhatsApp replies are answered in the language the parent wrote in — Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Hinglish included — with amounts, dates and names computed in code and preserved verbatim rather than regenerated by a model, and with the school’s own voice rather than a bot persona. Business-initiated messages use Meta-approved templates only, per-guardian opt-in is recorded, and STOP and START keywords toggle it in real time. The staff console itself ships in English and Hindi, alongside Tamil and Kannada.
Marathi as a taught subject is separate and non-optional: it has been compulsory from Class 1 to Class 10 in all schools since 2020-21, irrespective of board or medium.
What EdunodeX does for a Mumbai trust
- Fees. A single per-student ledger with fee items, class-level plans, installment schedules, transport and hostel subscriptions, grace days and late-fee formulas, concessions written to the affected installments with an audit record and reversible, waivers, write-offs, settlements and payment reversals. Amounts stored as integers in paise; receipt numbers from a database sequence in the form
RCP-YYYYMMDD-XXXXX. - Payments into your own account. Each school configures its own Razorpay or Cashfree credentials, so parent payments settle into that school’s merchant account. Stored secrets are encrypted, each school’s webhook is verified with that school’s own secret, and there is no shared platform fallback — an unconfigured gateway is simply unavailable.
- Finance operations. Vendor expenses by category against budgets, bank reconciliation against uploaded statements, and a Tally export with configurable GL mappings.
- Academics per board. Exam terms with weightages, marks entry, CBSE, ICSE and state grading systems, report cards with scholastic and co-scholastic sections, question bank and paper generation, curriculum and syllabus tracking.
- Attendance with real limits. Teachers can read and write attendance only for classes assigned to them in the current academic year, enforced server-side. Face and biometric attendance require a recorded consent status before the data is accessible, and the check sits in the query, not only in enrolment.
- Access control. Admin, Accountant, Principal and Teacher as built-in roles, with custom roles and a permission matrix on top.
- Compliance. A rules-driven engine with state-specific overrides, weekly re-evaluation, per-category reporting with CSV export, and a UDISE export. Consent for personal data is modelled explicitly, with grant and revoke, data export and an erasure request queue that honours fee-record retention.
What to verify before signing
Ask for a demo on your own data across two campuses with different funding status. Check that a user for one campus cannot see the other. Reproduce a fee structure from three years ago for one cohort. Send a parent message in Marathi and look at the actual handset. Then export everything and confirm you could leave if you had to.
On tax: fees for education up to higher secondary at a recognised institution are exempt from GST under Entry 66 of Notification 12/2017-Central Tax (Rate) dated 28 June 2017.