Vawsum in Odisha: the short answer

Vawsum is a school ERP and parent-teacher communication platform made by Vawsum Schools Pvt. Ltd. of Kolkata. Schools in Odisha using it include Aditya Birla Public School in Bhubaneswar, DAV Public School in Rourkela, Delhi Public School and Centurion JITM in Balangir, and Centurion Public School at Balangir, Dunguripali and Paralakhemundi. Across its Odisha schools, the modules used most are Vawsum Connect for parent-teacher communication, student attendance and fee management. Centurion Public School in Paralakhemundi is also a heavy user of Vawsum’s online examination module. Vawsum runs in both CBSE and Odisha state board schools.

Last updated: September 2026

Most of these schools are outside the state capital. Balangir has a cluster of three, and four carry the Centurion name, all running on Vawsum in towns far apart across western and southern Odisha. That spread is the useful part for any school weighing Vawsum: it shows the system working for a standalone school in Bhubaneswar and for campuses of the same group in different towns.

Across Vawsum’s schools in Odisha, three modules do most of the work, and that is not an accident. Parent communication, the daily register and the fee counter are the three things a school does every single working day, the three things parents actually notice, and the three things that break first when they are run on paper and WhatsApp. Get those right and the rest of an ERP has something to stand on. Get them wrong and no amount of timetabling or inventory software will rescue the project.

Vawsum Connect: parent-teacher communication

Connect is the part of Vawsum parents actually open. It is built around the Diary: before anything is sent, the teacher chooses who it goes to, and most diaries map to a class, section and subject. A homework note posted to the Class 7 B Science diary reaches exactly those students, their parents and their teachers, and nobody else. Custom diaries cover what does not fit a class – a school choir, a sports team, the parents organising annual day.

That one idea is why the unofficial class WhatsApp groups tend to fade once a school adopts Connect. Those groups exist because the official channel cannot reach the right thirty people. Once it can, the workaround is no longer needed, and the school keeps a record of what was said instead of losing it on somebody’s personal phone.

Schools outside the big cities also have a practical problem metro schools can forget: the parent body is not uniform. Some parents live in the app; some have a basic phone. Connect sends announcements, attendance and fee alerts by SMS as well as by push notification, so families without a smartphone are not left out. Teachers message parents one-to-one without sharing their personal mobile numbers, a parent with two children at the school follows both on one phone, and parents can correct their own contact details in the app – which matters when reminders are going to numbers that changed years ago. Polls, event invitations with RSVP and classroom photos go through the same channel.

Student attendance: keep the teacher, lose the register

Vawsum calls its approach to attendance phygital. The teacher who was in the room still decides who was present, but marks the class on a phone instead of a register – once a day, or period by period for senior classes – as Present, Absent or Late with a timestamp. Only a teacher mapped to that section can mark it, only one submission per class per day is accepted, and marking can close at a cut-off time, so the register is not filled in from memory at four in the afternoon. Holidays are configured so they never count as a day of mass absence.

The moment a child is marked absent, the parent is notified and can reply with the reason in the app. The morning phone call nobody wrote down becomes a documented record. Parents and students see attendance as a percentage in the app, and the office can filter every student below a threshold such as 75%. For a CBSE school that is the board eligibility list; for any school it is the list of children who need a conversation while there is still term left to fix it. Attendance also flows into the marksheet, so it appears on report cards without being compiled separately.

Fee management: every route into one ledger

Fees in most schools arrive by several routes at once: cash at the counter, cheques, UPI transfers and payments through a gateway. Vawsum’s fee management brings them into one ledger, so the management reads one report rather than reconciling four. Online collection runs on the school’s own merchant keys with Razorpay, PayU, SabPaisa or Easebuzz, or directly with ICICI, HDFC, Axis, Kotak, IDFC First, Bandhan, Indian Bank or Punjab National Bank, and card payments on a Razorpay or Axis POS machine at the counter post into the same ledger. Parents see their fee book in the app and pay from their phone, including unplanned charges that would otherwise come in as cash.

Where the fee module earns its keep, though, is in the controls. Fees are where a school’s record-keeping gets tested, by auditors, by management and by the occasional dispute at the counter.

Go-live runs from a structured checklist – student data, fee structures, classes and staff – so the school office knows what is needed and when, instead of discovering it halfway through the session. Training is given separately to principals, teachers and accounts staff, built around the work each of them actually does in the system. After go-live, schools have a helpdesk to call, and the Vawsum team visits schools periodically to check that things are running as they should.

The two kinds of support do different jobs. The everyday problems – a fee head set up wrongly, a teacher who can’t find the attendance screen, a report that needs one more column – are fixed fastest on a call with a shared screen. What a visit is good for is what a call can’t do: sitting with the office staff, seeing how they actually work, and catching the workaround before it turns into a habit.

Vawsum’s Odisha schools include both CBSE-affiliated schools and Odisha state board schools. Connect, attendance and fees – the modules they use most – work the same way regardless of board, as do admissions, transport and payroll.

For CBSE schools, the board-specific work is already in the product: the Uniform System of Assessment for Classes 1 to 10, 8-point and 9-point grade conversion, the LOC export for board registration, the 75% attendance safeguard that decides Class 10 and 12 admit card eligibility, and statutory transfer certificate templates. Vawsum also maintains the CBSE mandatory disclosure pages on its clients’ school websites. NEP holistic progress cards sit alongside standard marksheets.

The full list is on the school management software page. Most schools start with Connect, attendance and fees, and add the rest once their staff are comfortable.