Choosing software for an education consultancy

Most consultancies do not choose software. They outgrow spreadsheets and pick whatever someone demonstrates first. Which is usually a sales CRM built for closing deals in three weeks, then bent into a shape it was not designed for.

Here is what actually matters, in the order it will matter to you.

When the spreadsheet stops working

It does not break loudly. Around thirty active students, or when a second person needs to edit the same file, a few things start happening:

Two counsellors have slightly different versions. Nobody is sure which is current. A follow up that was on a sheet nobody opened this week does not happen. The owner asks how many students are at offer stage and the honest answer is that it would take an afternoon to find out.

None of that looks like failure. It looks like a busy office. That is what makes it expensive.

What a general CRM gets wrong

Sales CRMs model an opportunity: it opens, it progresses, it closes, it is worth an amount. That is not a student.

A student file runs for a year or more. It changes destination halfway through, which in a sales CRM means deleting the deal and starting again. It carries documents that expire and must be re-collected. It involves a parent who is paying but is not the applicant. It has a test result that gates everything downstream. It has a visa that is granted or refused long after any sale would have closed.

You can build all of that in custom fields. Offices that do find they have spent six months configuring software and still have no idea which twelve students were promised a call this week.

The questions worth asking before you pay

Can I see every student with an overdue next action, across the whole office, in one screen? If that takes more than a click, follow up will keep failing and the software will not be why you notice.

Does a student have a stage, and can I see how many are at each? Without this, no question about the pipeline has an answer.

When a counsellor leaves, what happens? Try to open a student's full history as someone else. If the record is thin because the real history was in that counsellor's phone, the system is decorative.

Where do documents live and who can open them? You hold passports and bank statements. Ask where they are stored, whether they are encrypted, whether access is logged, and what happens after the student departs. Vagueness here is an answer.

Can head office see every branch without asking anyone? If a report has to be prepared, it will be prepared favourably.

Can I get my data out? Ask before signing. The answer tells you how the relationship will feel in year three.

What to ignore

Feature lists. Every system has more features than you will use. The question is whether the four things you do daily are fast, not whether the thing you do annually is possible.

A demo with clean data. Ask to see it with three hundred students, half of them stalled, and two counsellors on leave. That is your office.

Anything priced per counsellor. Per seat pricing makes an owner ration logins, and the counsellor without a login writes on paper, and the paper is not in the system. You end up paying for software and keeping a parallel set of records.

The honest test

Take last week. Pick five students who should have been contacted and were not.

Then ask, for whichever system you are considering: would this have surfaced those five, to somebody, before the week ended?

If yes, it will pay for itself, because those five are the most expensive thing in your office. If no, it is a filing cabinet with a monthly fee.

That is the same test we hold ourselves to. OfficeYak exists because the thing that quietly loses a consultancy money is not the student who chose a competitor. It is the enquiry that came in on Sunday and was never called back, and the only fix is somewhere that remembers on your behalf and says so before the week is out.