One Desktop App for Students, Fees, Attendance and Results

Schools generate a lot of interlinked records, and in many independent schools they still live in separate places: an admissions register, a fee ledger in a spreadsheet, attendance in paper registers, results compiled term by term, and salary worked out by hand. Every question — has this family paid, how many days was this student absent, what did this class score — means opening a different file and trusting that it is the current version.

The brief called for a single application the front office could use all day, on ordinary Windows PCs, without depending on a stable internet connection or a monthly software bill. It had to be quick to enter data into, produce the printouts a school actually needs — fee receipts, attendance summaries, result cards — and keep the data local under the school's own control. Cloud-first school platforms were considered and set aside because connectivity and recurring cost were both concerns.

We built the CRM as an Electron desktop app so the interface could be developed with web technology while installing and running like native Windows software. Inside the app, an Express server handles the application logic and talks to a local SQLite database, which means the entire system — interface, API and data — lives on the machine it is installed on. There is nothing to host and nothing that stops working when the connection drops.

The data model is built around the student record. Admissions creates the student and links them to a class and guardian; fees track what is due, what has been paid and what is outstanding per student; attendance is recorded per class per day; results are entered per subject and exam and roll up into term reports; and the teacher module holds staff profiles alongside a salary section for monthly payroll. Because everything shares one database, a fee status, an attendance count and a result card all draw on the same student row.

SQLite was chosen deliberately: it needs no separate database server, the whole school's data is a single file that can be backed up by copying it, and it handles a school's record volume comfortably. Express gives the app a clean internal API, which also means the same logic could later be exposed to a web or mobile front end if the school ever wants remote access.