Built for the way a real school actually runs
Not a generic product with a logo swapped in. A system designed around the curriculum you teach, the term you budget in, the staff records your regulator expects, and parents on whatever phone they carry — wherever your school is.
Most school software is designed somewhere else and sold everywhere unchanged. It arrives with one curriculum baked in, monthly-only billing, a parent portal that assumes a smartphone, and a support desk eight time zones away.
Schools adapt around it. They keep a spreadsheet alongside for the things the system cannot express, run a second process for the transitional cohort, and continue phoning parents because the portal never reached them. The software is not wrong, exactly. It was simply built for a different set of assumptions.
What we decided to build instead
Msomi started from the assumptions that actually hold in a real school, wherever it runs. That a school may be teaching two curricula at once — CBC and KCSE, national and Cambridge, or any other pair — and needs both to be correct. That the academic year is divided into terms, and the budget follows them. That fees arrive by whatever method your parents actually use, and have to be matched to a learner. That a large share of guardians do not use a smartphone, and that these are disproportionately the families where contact from the school matters most.
None of those are exotic requirements. They are simply the ones you get right by default if you build them in as configuration, and retrofit badly if you hard-code one market's answer. We proved the model in Kenya first — CBC and KCSE running together, TSC numbers on every teacher record, and M-Pesa reconciled against the learner are the deepest, most tested example of it — and the underlying system runs any curriculum, in any region.
The idea underneath all of it
A school's problem is almost never a shortage of information. It is that the same fact is recorded in several places by several careful people, and those places disagree — so no report can be fully trusted and every question takes a morning to answer.
Msomi's whole proposition is one record per learner, one per member of staff, and every process reading from those rather than from a copy. Accurate reports, current dashboards, informed parents and a shorter end of term all follow from that. They are consequences, not features.
How we work with schools
We would rather tell a school that Msomi is the wrong fit before a demo than have them find out three months into a subscription. When a school asks which plan they need, we sometimes recommend the cheaper one. When a school wants to leave, their data exports in a format they can use.
That is not generosity. A school management system is a decade-long relationship, and the only version of it that works is one where the school is not trapped.
Six things we will not trade away
One record, not eleven copies
Every feature reads from the same learner and staff record. We add nothing that requires a school to maintain a parallel list, because the parallel list is where the trouble always starts.
Nobody excluded by their handset
Every notification has an SMS equivalent. A product that only reaches parents with smartphones reaches the wrong parents.
Configured, not assumed
Curriculum frameworks, grade boundaries, admission number formats and fee structures are things a school defines. We do not decide what an A is.
Your data leaves whenever you want
Every list exports to Excel on demand, without a support ticket. A vendor confident in their product has no reason to make leaving difficult.
Built for the room, not the demo
Registers and marks work offline, because the signal in a classroom block is not the signal in the front office. Software that only works in ideal conditions gets abandoned.
Separation we can prove
Msomi runs many schools on one platform. The boundary between them is enforced where data is read, not in the page that displays it.
Register your school and we will take it from there
Set up your own login in a few minutes. We confirm every school by phone before activating it, so nobody can register a school in your name — and you are usually live within one working day.
Or try it first — the Trial tier gives you a full term, free, with every module unlocked. See plans.
Either way we confirm your school by phone before activating it, so you are live usually within one working day.