A sales demo is a rehearsed performance on clean data. That is not dishonest — it is how demos work — but it means an hour can pass without you learning anything that predicts daily use.

Twelve requests change that. You will not get through all of them; pick the six that match your pain.

Make them use your data

1. Send a sample of twenty of your real student records beforehand and ask for them to be loaded. A vendor who cannot import twenty rows before a demo will struggle with five years of history.

2. Ask for a student with a messy record — a mid-year joiner, a concession, a changed section.

Test the joins between departments

3. Take a cash fee payment at the counter, then open the parent login and show the balance. If it has not changed, the portal is a copy.

4. Change a student’s section and show what updates by itself — attendance list, fee ledger, transport, parent login.

5. Show examination eligibility being calculated from live attendance and dues, not typed in.

Test the speed of the daily jobs

6. Mark attendance for a full class, on a phone, and time it. Then ask what happens if the network drops halfway.

7. Issue a fee receipt, front to back, as a clerk would during admission week.

8. Produce dues by class as of today.

Test the documents that cause trouble

9. Generate a transfer certificate for a student who left two years ago.

10. Produce a report card in your format, then move one column.

Test the parts nobody demos

11. Change a mark, then show the log of who changed it and when. If there is no log, that is a governance gap worth knowing about.

12. Export all your data as you would if you were leaving. Ask to see the file.

The commercial questions to ask in the same meeting

What is the three-year cost if enrolment grows 20%? Which modules are not included? Who loads five years of history, and at what cost? What does training six new staff in year two cost? What is the notice period, and what does a data export cost on exit?

Ask for those five in writing. A vendor comfortable putting them in writing is usually comfortable to work with.

A note on our own demo

We would rather run a demo on your data than ours, including the awkward records. If something on your list is not supported, we will say so in the meeting rather than let you discover it in month three.

Questions we get asked about this

How long should a demo take?

About an hour, and you should be driving it. If the vendor presents for fifty minutes and takes questions at the end, you have watched a presentation rather than tested a product.

Should we send our own data before the demo?

Yes. Twenty real student records, including a mid-year joiner and a concession case. A vendor who cannot load twenty rows before a meeting will struggle with five years of history.

Who from our school should attend?

The person who will actually use it daily — usually the office clerk — plus a teacher for the attendance test. A demo attended only by management tests the wrong things.

What is the single most revealing request?

Take a cash payment at the counter, then refresh the parent login. If the balance has not changed, the portal is a copy of your data rather than a view of it, and you will spend years explaining the difference to parents.

What commercial questions should we ask in the same meeting?

Three-year cost with 20% growth, which modules are excluded, who loads five years of history and at what cost, training cost in year two, and notice period plus data export cost on exit. Ask for all five in writing.

To book one, write to contact@digierp.in or call +91 83498 62321. Related: the buyer’s checklist.