Private schools, charter networks, and districts run on disconnected tools: an admissions spreadsheet, a separate gradebook, an email thread for parent updates, and a finance system that talks to none of them. Administrators spend hours reconciling five versions of the same student record. Staff answer the same parent question four times because the portal is too slow or too confusing to use. Timetables take days to rebuild when one teacher changes. Fee runs require manual chasing every term. When your school's complexity has outgrown off-the-shelf platforms, we build the system your administrators, teachers, and parents actually need.
Student information systems with a single record for each student covering enrollment, attendance, grades, and family contacts
Parent portals that surface attendance, grades, invoices, and school notices in one place, without staff fielding the same calls repeatedly
Timetabling engines that rebuild a valid schedule in minutes when availability changes, factoring in room capacity and teacher constraints
Fee management and billing with automated invoicing, online payment via Stripe, installment plans, and overdue reminders without manual chasing
Recognition
Administrators reconciling student data across three separate systems every week because your SIS, gradebook, and billing platform don't share records?
Parents calling the office for attendance updates and fee balances because the parent portal is too clunky for them to use themselves?
Timetable rebuilds taking your admin team two full days every time a teacher's availability changes?
The short answer
RaftLabs builds custom K-12 school management software for private schools, charter networks, school districts, and edtech companies. We deliver student information systems, attendance and grading tools, parent communication portals, timetabling engines, and fee management platforms that replace spreadsheets and disconnected tools with a single, compliant system built around each school's actual workflows.
School management software is a purpose-built platform that centralises the administrative and academic operations of a K-12 school or district. It covers student enrollment and records, attendance tracking, grading and reporting, parent and guardian communication, class scheduling and timetabling, and fee billing and collection. Custom school management software is built around the specific workflows, compliance requirements, and data structures of a particular school, network, or district rather than forcing those workflows into a generic off-the-shelf mould.
01 Diagnosis
Student records spread across five systems with no single source of truth
When enrollment lives in a spreadsheet, attendance in a separate app, grades in a third tool, and fee history in a billing platform that none of the others connect to, every administrative task starts with a reconciliation exercise. A parent calls about their child's status, and the office manager checks three places before giving an answer. A new teacher asks who is enrolled in their class, and someone emails a CSV that was accurate last week.The cost is time, but it is also errors. A student's allergy information lives in admissions but not in the gradebook the teacher checks. A sibling discount applied in billing was never reflected in the attendance record that triggered a welfare follow-up. When the records are fragmented, the gaps between them create both administrative burden and genuine risk.A unified student information system keeps a single record per student, updated in real time across every module, so the answer to any question about a student is the same regardless of who asks it or from which screen they are looking.
Parents calling the office for information the portal should be giving them
A parent portal that parents cannot figure out, or that shows data that is 24 hours old, is not a portal: it is a website that generates phone calls. When fee balances are unclear, when attendance alerts arrive late, or when grade updates require three logins to find, parents default to calling the office. The office handles the same five questions all morning.The cost is twofold. Administrative staff spend time answering questions the system should answer automatically. And parents who cannot easily see what is happening with their child's education feel less confident in the school, which matters for retention in private and charter school environments where families choose to be there.A parent portal that shows live attendance, current grades, upcoming events, outstanding fee balances, and school notices in a single mobile-friendly screen removes the friction. Automated push notifications via Twilio and email alerts cut inbound calls without requiring parents to remember to check.
Timetable rebuilds consuming two days of administrator time every term
Manual timetabling is one of the most time-consuming administrative tasks in a school. When a teacher changes availability, goes on leave, or a new subject is added, someone has to rebuild the schedule by hand: checking room capacity, resolving conflicts across year groups, confirming specialist teachers are not double-booked across campuses. In schools with more than 15 classes, this takes days.The errors that slip through create further cost: two classes assigned to the same room, a teacher scheduled for a session they marked unavailable, a compulsory subject clashing with a required co-curricular. Each conflict requires another round of manual correction and re-notification.A timetabling engine encodes teacher availability, room capacity, subject constraints, and year group requirements. When inputs change, it produces a valid schedule in minutes and surfaces conflicts for review rather than leaving them to surface on the first day of term.
Fee collection running on manual invoicing, chasing, and reconciliation every term
According to a 2025 survey by the National Business Officers Association, 63% of private school business officers cited fee collection and reconciliation as their top administrative burden, with the average school spending 14 hours per billing cycle on manual follow-up for outstanding invoices.When invoices are generated in one system, payments land in a bank account, and the reconciliation is done in a spreadsheet, the process requires three people touching the same data. Overdue fees are chased by email or phone, one family at a time. Installment plans are tracked manually. When a sibling discount or scholarship applies, someone has to remember to apply it.Automated fee management invoices on a defined schedule, accepts online payments via Stripe, applies discounts and installment plans at the record level, sends automated overdue reminders, and reconciles to the school's accounts in real time. The business office sees what is outstanding across the entire school in one view, without chasing spreadsheets.
02 What we ship
The SIS is the operational core of school management software: a single database that holds every student's enrollment status, personal and family contact records, medical notes, learning support flags, historical attendance, academic transcript, and fee account. When the SIS is the source of truth, every other module, gradebook, parent portal, billing, and timetable, reads from and writes to the same record.
We build SIS platforms with role-based access so teachers see the student context relevant to their class, administrators see the full record, and parents see only their child's data. Enrollment workflows cover application intake, document collection, approval, and class assignment. Transfer and withdrawal processes keep the historical record intact for transcript and compliance purposes.
Built for private schools replacing multiple disconnected tools, charter networks managing student records across campuses, and districts building a unified data layer for state reporting and accountability.
Attendance taken on paper or in a separate app that does not connect to the SIS creates a daily reconciliation task. We build attendance modules where teachers mark attendance on a mobile-friendly screen, the record updates the SIS in real time, and automated alerts go to parents and the pastoral team when a student is absent without explanation. Attendance reports for individual students, classes, and year groups are generated without manual export or calculation.
Grading modules support both standards-based and traditional percentage grading, with configurable weightings per subject. Assignment grades entered in the gradebook update the running average immediately. Report card generation pulls the live gradebook so the reporting process is hours, not days. Integration with Google Classroom or Canvas pulls assignment grades submitted through the LMS without re-entry.
Built for schools where attendance and grading currently live in separate tools, schools needing automated parent alerts, and networks requiring cross-campus grade reporting.
A parent portal that requires multiple logins, shows stale data, or works poorly on mobile is a portal that parents stop using. We build parent-facing portals where each guardian sees their child's live attendance record, current grades, upcoming assignments, school calendar events, notices and announcements, and outstanding fee balance, in a single screen that works on any device.
Messaging between parents and teachers or the administrative office is logged, searchable, and visible to relevant staff. Push notifications via Twilio and email alerts via SendGrid go out automatically when attendance is marked, a grade is posted, or a payment is due. Parents receive the information without calling. Administrators field fewer repetitive enquiries.
Built for schools where parents currently rely on phone calls and emails for routine information, private and independent schools where parent experience is a retention factor, and multi-campus networks managing parent communication at scale.
Timetabling software encodes the constraints that make manual scheduling so slow: teacher availability and qualifications, room capacity and equipment requirements, subject clash rules across year groups, co-curricular commitments, and specialist facility access such as science labs or sports halls. When inputs change, the engine regenerates a valid schedule and surfaces any remaining conflicts for human review.
We build timetabling modules for schools that run traditional single-campus schedules and for networks managing shared teachers across multiple sites. Drag-and-drop manual overrides let administrators adjust the generated schedule without starting from scratch. The published timetable feeds directly into the teacher's gradebook and the student-facing portal so class links, rooms, and times stay in sync without a second update.
Built for schools where timetable changes currently take days of administrator time, networks with shared specialist teachers across campuses, and secondary schools managing option-block scheduling for senior year groups.
Fee management software generates invoices on a defined schedule, applies sibling discounts, scholarship reductions, and installment plans at the account level, and sends automated payment reminders without manual chasing. Online payment via Stripe gives families a direct payment path from the invoice or parent portal. Cash and cheque payments recorded by the business office update the account immediately.
The business office dashboard shows every account's status: paid, part-paid, overdue, and on a plan, across the full school, without opening individual records. Overdue workflows send a tiered sequence of reminders before escalating to the business manager's queue. Financial reports, fee income by year group, outstanding debt aging, scholarship totals, export directly to accounting systems such as Xero or QuickBooks.
Built for private and independent schools replacing manual invoicing, charter networks managing fee collection across multiple campuses, and schools whose current billing system does not connect to the SIS.
Admissions software manages the full intake pipeline from initial enquiry through application, document submission, assessment, offer, acceptance, and enrollment into the SIS. Each stage is tracked against a configurable workflow. Automated emails keep families informed of their application status without the admissions team sending each one manually. Application forms are built in the admin interface, not in code, so the team can add a new intake year or adjust the form without a developer.
Waitlist management ranks applicants against configurable criteria and generates offers automatically when a place opens. Re-enrollment for returning families triggers a simplified annual process rather than a full application. Enrollment data flows directly into the SIS on acceptance so the student record is complete on the first day without manual data entry.
Built for private schools managing competitive admissions, charter networks running rolling enrollment, and schools where the current admissions process involves emailing PDF forms and tracking responses in a spreadsheet.
03 How we work
Companies we've built for
04 Track record
06 Client voices
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.
USARaftLabs nailed what other agencies couldn't — they started with our business problem and worked backwards to the right product. We were live in 14 weeks.
07 Why us
The industry changes. The broken process usually looks the same. Across 14+ industries and 100+ products, we recognise your problem fast, and we frame the fix around your margin and your operations.
We measure success the way you do: hours saved, revenue earned, margin recovered. We stay through launch and growth, so the result is ours to own.
Vodafone, T-Mobile, Cisco, Energia, Aldi, Nike. Six years, 100+ products in production, 4.9 on Clutch. Serious businesses keep coming back because we stay accountable long after launch.
08 Questions
Yes. We build student information systems that consolidate enrollment records, family contacts, attendance, grades, transcripts, and fee history into a single database. We scope which data lives where, map the migration from your current spreadsheets or legacy system, and build the import pipeline. Administrators get one record per student instead of five partial ones spread across disconnected tools.
Yes. Parent portals fail when they require too many steps or show data that is a day out of date. We build portals where parents see live attendance, grades, upcoming events, school notices, and their fee balance in one login, on mobile and desktop. Push notifications via Twilio and email via SendGrid mean parents receive alerts without needing to check the portal manually. Inbound calls to the office drop because parents can answer their own questions.
A focused module, such as a parent portal, attendance tracker, or fee management system, typically delivers in 10 to 14 weeks. A full school management platform covering SIS, grading, timetabling, parent portal, and billing runs 16 to 24 weeks depending on scope. Cost for a focused module starts around $25,000. A full platform runs $60,000 to $150,000. Fixed cost is agreed before development starts, with milestone-based payments.
Yes. FERPA requirements and state-level student privacy laws are designed into the system from the start. That means role-based access controls so staff only see what their role requires, encrypted storage of student records at rest and in transit, audit logs of every data access, and data processing agreements for any sub-processors such as AWS, Twilio, or Stripe. We document the data flows your compliance review will need and can support COPPA requirements for platforms used by students under 13.
Yes. We build API integrations with Google Classroom, Canvas, and other LMS platforms so student rosters, assignment grades, and attendance records sync without manual re-entry. We also integrate with Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 for scheduling, Stripe for fee collection, Zoom for online class links, and state reporting systems where required. Every integration dependency is confirmed during discovery before any development begins.
Yes. If your core SIS works but you need a custom parent portal, a tailored timetabling module, or a fee management layer it cannot deliver, we build the custom layer alongside the existing system via API. We scope exactly what needs to be built custom versus what stays on the existing platform. The result is targeted software that fills the gap rather than a full replacement with its associated data migration risk.
Tell us which modules you need, which systems you need to replace or integrate with, and we will scope it out together.