School Software for Delhi Under the 2025 Fee Act

If you run a private unaided school in Delhi, the software question changed in August 2025. The Delhi School Education (Transparency in Fixation and Regulation of Fees) Act, 2025 — Delhi Act No. 04 of 2025, passed by the Assembly on 8 August 2025, assented to by the Lt. Governor on 13 August and published in the Delhi Gazette on 14 August — moved fee-setting out of the management’s hands and into a committee that includes five parents drawn by lottery. The Directorate of Education then issued fresh guidelines in July 2026 requiring every recognised private unaided school to constitute its committee for the 2026-27 session.

That changes what records your office must produce, who is allowed to see them, and how long a fee decision stands. Any software you buy now has to survive that regime.

Delhi is now a three-year fee block, not an annual fee revision

Under Section 5(2), the management submits its proposed fee for the next block of three academic years, with the relevant records, to the School Level Fee Regulation Committee by 31 July of the current academic year. Section 5(5) makes the approved fee binding on the school for those three academic years. The current block is 2026-27 to 2028-29.

That ends the annual fee-revision cycle most Delhi school offices were built around. You produce a three-year case once and then live with it, which means the fee heads you get approved, and the way you record them, matter far more than they used to.

Section 2(6) defines “fee” broadly: tuition fee including the necessary syllabus, session fee (capped at one month’s tuition fee per session), library fee, laboratory fee, caution money, examination fee, hostel and mess charges, physical education fee, and development fee. If your accounting treats any of these as an add-on collected outside the ledger, the Act does not.

What the School Level Fee Regulation Committee actually asks your office for

Section 4(1)(b) requires the committee to be constituted before 15 July every academic year, with a fixed composition: the management’s nominee as chairperson, the principal as secretary, three teachers selected by lottery draw, five parents from the Parent-Teacher Association selected by lottery draw, and an observer nominated by the Director of Education. At least one member must be from the SC, ST or socially and educationally backward classes, appointed by rotation, and at least two members must be women.

Two disclosure duties follow. Under Section 4(2), the list of chairperson and members goes on the notice board and website within seven working days of constitution, with a copy to the authorised officer. Under Section 5(4), the approved fee details must be displayed on the notice board in Hindi, English and the relevant medium-of-instruction language, and on the school’s website if it has one.

The committee must approve by unanimous consent within thirty days of receiving the records. If it fails to fix the fee by 15 September, Section 5(7) sends the matter to the District Fee Appellate Committee, and the management charges the previous year’s fee in the meantime. An aggrieved parents’ group — defined in Section 2(2) as not less than 15 per cent of the parents of the affected class or school — can appeal within thirty days.

Section 13 makes several common fee-recovery habits illegal

This is the provision that most directly touches software. Section 13(1) bars a school from harassing or compelling any student to pay or delay payment, and names four specific acts:

1. Striking the student’s name off the rolls for non-payment of a fee not fixed under the Act
2. Withholding examination results
3. Denying participation in teaching, classes or activities
4. Public humiliation or psychological harassment

Section 13(2) sets the penalty at Rs 50,000 per student, per violation. Separately, Section 12(2) prescribes not less than Rs 1 lakh (up to Rs 5 lakh) for a first violation of the fee provisions and not less than Rs 2 lakh (up to Rs 10 lakh) for a second, doubling if a refund order is not complied with in twenty working days and escalating further at forty and sixty days.

If your fee software has an automated escalation that blocks a report card, suspends portal access, or publishes a defaulters list, that automation is now a legal exposure in Delhi. Ask the vendor where the block lives and how you turn it off.

EWS, DG and CWSN admissions run on the Directorate’s draw, not yours

Delhi’s 25 per cent reservation at entry level — Pre-School, Pre-Primary and Class I in private unaided recognised schools other than minority institutions — is allotted through a centralised computerised draw of lots run by the Directorate of Education, not by individual schools. For 2026-27, 55,701 seats were on offer, of which 48,092 were under the EWS and DG categories, with scrutiny between 9 and 22 April.

Your school’s job is downstream: receive the allotment, verify documents in a compressed window, and enrol. The question for software is whether your admission records carry the category, allotment reference and verification status cleanly enough to answer a Directorate query months later.

NCR is one property market and three fee laws

Parents shortlist across Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, Noida and Ghaziabad as if it were one city. Legally it is not. A Gurugram or Faridabad school files Form VI with the Haryana education department and answers to a divisional Fee and Fund Regulatory Committee; a Noida or Ghaziabad school sits under Uttar Pradesh’s framework; only a school inside the NCT is governed by the 2025 Act. If you operate campuses on both sides of the border, do not accept a single fee-approval workflow across them — the filing artefacts are different documents with different deadlines and different approving bodies.

How EdunodeX handles the Delhi fee block

EdunodeX keeps every fee head — tuition, session, library, laboratory, examination, transport, hostel — in one per-student ledger rather than separate registers, which is the form the committee’s three-year submission needs. Money is stored as integers in paise, so a structure reproduced three years later reconciles exactly rather than drifting through floating-point rounding.

What matters under this Act:

• Concessions are reversible and audited. A concession reduces the student’s unpaid installments in place, stored as a ledger field with a per-installment audit row, so a waiver granted in year one of the block is still explainable in year three. Concessions above a configured threshold route to an approvals inbox instead of applying silently.
• Late fees are a configurable formula, not a hard block. Grace days and a flat, percentage or daily rule are set per school, and an accountant can waive a penalty inline. There is no built-in behaviour that withholds a result or strikes a name — which is what Section 13 requires you to be able to say.
• Receipts are sequence-numbered. Receipt numbers follow an RCP-YYYYMMDD-NNNNN pattern issued from a Postgres sequence, so a numbering gap is a real event and not a race condition.
• Payments go into the school’s own merchant account. Each school configures its own Razorpay or Cashfree credentials; there is no shared platform key.
• Parent notices are template-controlled. WhatsApp sends use Meta-approved templates with per-guardian opt-in and STOP/START handling, and quiet hours default to 21:00–07:00 IST. The admin interface ships in four languages — English, Hindi, Tamil and Kannada — of which English and Hindi are the two that matter in Delhi.
• Tally export. GL mappings export to Tally XML or CSV, which is usually how the audited financial statements behind a fee proposal actually get produced.

On admissions, the reservation categories, RTE income threshold, RTE export columns and age cut-off are driven by the school’s state code and can be overridden per column, and the admissions inbox produces per-state RTE and quota CSV exports. UDISE+ export is supported for government reporting; UDISE+ 2024-25 data was released by the Ministry of Education on 28 August 2025.

One honest caveat: EdunodeX does not submit anything to the Directorate of Education on your behalf. There is no such API. It keeps the underlying record in a shape you can defend when the committee, or an aggrieved parents’ group, asks for it.

Four questions to put to a Delhi vendor in writing

Ask any vendor these four questions, in writing:

1. Show me the fee ledger for one student across a three-year approved block, with every head separated.
2. Show me where automated fee escalation is configured, and prove no escalation withholds results or blocks class participation.
3. Show me the export that produces the audited fee statement my committee needs by 31 July.
4. Show me the fee display in Hindi, English and my medium of instruction.

The second question is the one that matters most.