A university ERP is the software that runs a university's own money and staff: its accounts, purchasing, payroll and human resources (HR). ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, the name for the software in which an organisation keeps its accounts, purchases and staff records. A university ERP is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system adapted to the way universities work. It is often sold together with the student information system (SIS), as one suite.
Note a difference in words. Indian students often call their college portal "the ERP". But strictly, the portal mostly shows the student information system. The university ERP is the part that students rarely see.
How is a university ERP different from a company's ERP? A university earns most of its income from fees, government grants and research grants. Each grant may be spent only on the purpose for which it was given. So the ERP keeps each grant as a separate fund, with its own budget. This is called fund accounting.
Take, for example, a private university near Guntur with 1,100 teaching and non-teaching staff. A government research agency gives one of its laboratories ₹45 lakh over three years, for a project on water purification. The ERP opens a fund for the project with a budget of ₹45 lakh. When the laboratory orders a spectrometer for ₹6 lakh, the order follows fixed steps. The professor raises a request. A finance officer approves it, after the ERP shows that the project still has ₹39 lakh left. The purchase team raises a purchase order. The ERP pays the supplier only after the laboratory confirms that the spectrometer has arrived. The ₹6 lakh is recorded against this grant only, and not against the university's general budget. At the end of the year, the ERP prepares a utilisation certificate, a statement of how the grant money was spent. The agency asks for it before it releases the next year's money.
On the 25th of each month, the same ERP collects each employee's attendance and leave, and calculates the salaries. It deducts provident fund (PF), the retirement savings that the law requires, and income tax deducted at source (TDS). The accounts module records the salary payments, and also the fees that the SIS has collected.
Public universities follow government purchase rules. Many of them must buy through the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), an online store run by the Government of India, or through tenders. The ERP records each step, so that auditors can check it later. Some universities do not use the ERP's own payroll. Instead, they send staff records to a separate HR and payroll system.
The large university ERP companies sell mainly to universities in the United States, and some of them build their products in Bengaluru.