KakshaOne — Open-Source School Management SaaS

School operations involve deeply interconnected entities — students, fees, exams, attendance — that shift mid-year (transfers, promotions). KakshaOne models each school as a tenant with slug-based routing and query-level isolation, while feature-gating tiers control capacity. PDF generation (marksheets, certificates, fee slips, ID cards) is a first-class concern, not an afterthought.

A Next.js App Router application with 107 API route files organized by domain: auth, school management, student management, staff management, academics, attendance, fees & payments, financials, reports, and infrastructure (cron jobs, uploads, notifications). Three portals — admin, staff, student — plus a platform-level super admin and a registration wizard. Razorpay webhooks settle payments per school.

30+ Prisma models covering organizations (schools), users with 4 roles, students, staff, classes, subjects, timetables, exams, results, homework and submissions, study materials, certificates, ID cards, attendance, fee categories/structures/payments, expenses, and subscriptions.

Fee management is the most complex module — installments, sibling discounts, late fees, scholarships, refunds, and reconciliation with Razorpay webhooks. Certificate and marksheet PDF generation had to handle print-quality layout. Multi-tenancy required every query to carry the school slug while keeping shared infrastructure.

Shared infrastructure across schools with PostgreSQL connection pooling, Upstash Redis rate limiting and caching, Vercel cron jobs for fee reminders and student promotion, and background PDF generation to keep requests fast. Feature gates control per-plan limits on students, staff, and storage.

Razorpay webhooks are idempotent — duplicate callbacks never double-credit fees. Attendance saves are transactional and batch-rolled-back on partial failure. Report generation retries with backoff. Feature gates fall back safely for unknown tiers.

Admin dashboards for fee collection, attendance trends, exam results, and finance reports. Audit logs track record modifications. Cron job execution logs in Vercel. Structured logging with correlation across API calls.

Next.js API routes over a separate backend for deployment simplicity. Prisma over raw SQL for type safety. Razorpay over Stripe for the Indian market. Per-school Razorpay accounts over a central account for direct settlement. Feature-gated tiers over hardcoded plans.