Mujhtaba Bhat, Co-founder · 2 min read
Acado is a cloud ERP for schools, colleges and institution groups. It is also the second education system our team has built, and the first one owes a lot to the years spent on the first.
The first system
The founders of Acado started RationalTabs in Kashmir more than fourteen years ago. Its education ERP grew to serve most of the nursing and paramedical colleges across Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, along with schools and other institutions — more than 180 clients today.
It ran on servers inside each campus, and that was a deliberate choice. In Kashmir, the internet could disappear for weeks. A system that needed a connection to mark attendance or print a receipt was a system the office could not depend on. So we built for the worst day, not the best one.
The worst days came often enough. During curfews, with the roads closed and the network down, members of our team sent attendance alerts to parents by hand, so that families still heard from the college. When a campus needed an update, someone drove there. It was not elegant. It worked, and the colleges stayed with us.
What changed
Over the years the ground shifted. Connectivity improved. Institutions started running several campuses, sometimes in different states, and wanted one view across all of them. Parents expected to see fees and attendance on a phone. Staff expected to mark attendance from the classroom, not from a desktop in the office.
Those are not things a server inside one campus does well. They are what cloud software is for.
So we built Acado from the beginning as a cloud platform: one student record, one ledger, one login, with each institution's data kept separate and every campus of a group visible from one dashboard. A multi-campus education group ran it live for more than a year, through admissions, fee cycles and exams, before we took it to market. In its first year Acado is in daily use at more than forty institutions, with more than 55,000 students, parents and staff signed in.
What we kept
Three things came across from the first system unchanged.
- Build for the worst day. Fee day, results day, the first week of a session. The system and the team are organised around those days.
- Settings, not custom builds. Fee heads, grading scales, roles and approval chains are settings an institution's own staff change. We would rather ship a setting every institution can use than a private build only we can maintain.
- Someone picks up. A person who knows your institution, not a queue. More on how we support you.
Acado is built in Kashmir by Framing Ideaz AI & Tech, by the same founders. If you run an institution and want to see it with your own fee structure and class list, book a demo.