Free Fee Management for K-12 Schools

Yes. The Community Edition fees module is released under LGPLv3. Schools can download the source, run it on their own server, modify the code, and never pay OpenEduCat a license fee. The honest caveat: free software does not mean free infrastructure. You will still pay for a server, domain, SSL, and any payment-gateway transaction fees.

A small DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or AWS Lightsail VPS runs $10 to $30 per month and is sufficient for most K-12 schools in this range. Add backup storage, domain renewal, and SSL (free via Let's Encrypt) and most schools land between $150 and $400 per year in hosting. If you need a managed install, OpenEduCat Cloud and partners offer paid hosting plans.

Proprietary K-12 SaaS typically charges per-student per-year (often $1-5 per student), bundles fees with attendance and parent apps, and locks your data inside their cloud. OpenEduCat charges zero license fees, lets you self-host (data stays on your infrastructure), and the fees module sits inside the same Odoo-based ERP as accounting, HR, and inventory. The trade-off: you take on hosting and updates yourself, or pay a partner.

No. The software is free; the gateway is not. Stripe and Razorpay charge roughly 2 to 3 percent per transaction plus a fixed fee, and UPI in India is currently mostly zero-MDR for schools but can vary by aggregator. ACH and bank transfer fees are usually lower. Schools should compare gateway pricing separately — the OpenEduCat module is gateway-agnostic, so you can switch processors without changing fee software.

The software does not enforce regional caps automatically — that is a policy decision your school sets. But because every fee head, installment, and concession is auditable and exportable, schools in Karnataka (Karnataka Education Act, 1983 and the Karnataka Educational Institutions Prohibition of Capitation Fee Act), Tamil Nadu (Fee Determination Committee), or the UAE (KHDA Education Cost Index) can produce the line-item fee schedules regulators ask for. The Karnataka State Education Act fee-regulation framework is the standard citation we point implementers to.

Yes. Refunds are posted as separate accounting entries against the original invoice, with reason codes, approver name, date, and method. Receipt numbers are sequential and non-editable once issued. Reversed receipts get a cancellation entry rather than being deleted, which is what most state education boards and external auditors expect.

OpenEduCat ships its own SIS (admissions, enrollment, batches, grades), so most schools run fees and SIS together. If you already have a separate SIS like PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or a custom system, the fees module exposes a REST/JSON-RPC API and CSV import-export, so a developer can sync student rosters and balances on a nightly schedule.