The questions worth askingbefore you commit.
Migration, cost, staff adoption, unreliable connections, and who can see a child’s records. A school choosing an operations platform is making a multi-year decision, and the fastest way to make it badly is to be told only the half that sells.
What adopting Tavech actually involves.
Getting started
How long does it take to get a school running?
It depends almost entirely on the state of your existing records. A school with clean spreadsheets of students, staff and classes can be operational in days. A school pulling data out of an older system, or off paper, should plan for weeks — most of which is checking the data rather than configuring the platform. We do that work with you rather than handing you an import template and wishing you luck.
Can we bring our existing data across?
Yes. Students, guardians, staff, classes, subjects and historical results can be imported. The honest constraint is quality, not format: if two spreadsheets disagree about which class a child is in, no import fixes that. We surface those conflicts before anything is written rather than after.
Do we have to move everything at once?
No, and most schools should not. A common path is to start with students, staff and attendance for one term, add assessments and results at the end of it, and bring finance across at the start of the next financial period. Each module works without the others being finished.
What happens if we decide to leave?
Your data is yours and you can export it. We would rather lose a school cleanly than hold anyone in place through the cost of leaving — a product that has to trap a school is not one we want to have built.
The questions an IT lead or a board should ask before trusting anybody with this.
Security and data
Could anybody outside our school reach our data?
No. Your school has its own address, its own accounts and its own records, and nothing outside it can reach in. That boundary is checked on every single request rather than left to a setting somebody has to remember, and it is the part of the product we test hardest.
Can a parent see another family’s child?
No. A guardian signs in and finds their own children — attendance, published results, what is owed. Another family’s child is simply not there for them, whatever they type into the address bar.
Who can see a change to a student’s marks?
Important changes record who made them, when, and the values before and after. That history is surfaced to authorised school staff in the product, not left in a server log for an engineer to retrieve.
Where is our data stored?
In managed cloud infrastructure with automated backups and a documented restore procedure. If your institution has a specific residency requirement, raise it early — it is a legitimate constraint and better discussed before you commit than after.
How it behaves once the term has started.
Using it day to day
Can we configure it to how our school actually works?
That is the point of the product. Grading scales, term structures, attendance rules, fee categories, approval steps, custom roles, branding and report card layouts are all configuration. A school that grades differently from its neighbour should not need a code change, and with Tavech it does not.
Can we create our own roles?
Yes — an Examination Officer, a Registrar, a Librarian, a Discipline Officer. A school defines the role and the permissions it carries. There is one guard rail: an administrator cannot grant a permission they do not themselves hold, which prevents someone quietly promoting themselves.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and it is built for the phone a teacher is actually holding — a register marked at the classroom door, marks entered between lessons, a parent checking results on the way home. It installs to the home screen and opens like an app, without anybody being sent to an app store or asked to update it.
What about poor or intermittent connectivity?
The two things a teacher does under time pressure keep working without one. A register marked at the classroom door and marks entered at a desk are held on the device and sent the moment the connection returns — the same submission, never a duplicate, and the screen tells you what is still waiting. Rolls and contact details are cached for the same reason, so the class list is there before the signal is. Everything else needs a connection, and a school on a genuinely bad line should say so early enough for us to be honest about it.
How do parents get access?
A guardian exists in the school’s records whether or not they ever sign in — the school always has the contact. Portal access is granted separately, so a school can record every guardian without being forced to create accounts for all of them.
What it costs and who answers when something breaks.
Commercials and support
What does it cost?
The figures are published rather than quoted, so you can work out your own price on the pricing page without speaking to anybody. Core and Institution are a flat fee for the size your school is — nothing in them is billed by the child — and only Enterprise is priced per pupil, because everything in it costs more the more children there are. Core is what a school needs to fly, Institution is everything the school runs on, and Enterprise is the one where the system does the work rather than only recording it. Anything outside the package you choose can be added on its own rather than forcing you up to the next one. Charged each term, because that is how a school budgets, or pay for the year and keep a tenth of it. Staff accounts are not charged per seat — per-seat pricing makes schools ration accounts, which quietly undermines the audit trail. Bringing your records across is free. Setup and training are quoted separately. SMS is not ours to price: your school connects its own provider account and the network invoices you.
Who do we talk to when something goes wrong?
Someone who can actually fix it. There is no support tier to escalate through and no account manager relaying your problem to a queue — you reach the people who build and operate the platform, which is why an issue raised during exam week gets handled during that week.
What if we need a feature you do not have?
Tell us. A good proportion of what is on the roadmap came from schools describing a real workflow. What we will not do is build a private branch of the product for one school — that path ends in a codebase nobody can maintain and a product that gets worse for everyone.
Still have a question?
Ask it directly, and you will get the answer from somebody who built the thing you are asking about.