Ask any school administrator what they wish their software did better once they're past the first month, and you'll hear the same short list every time. Let us take payments online so the fee office isn't drowning in reconciliation. Let us get a clean, printable report out of the system without copy-pasting into a spreadsheet. And help us stay on the right side of data-protection law. This release answers all three, and throws in a more flexible way for multi-campus groups to run the platform.
Here's what changed.
Taking fee payments online with Stripe and PayPal
If you've ever spent the last week of the month matching bank transfers to invoices by hand, you already know why this one matters. GridX SCM now accepts fee and subscription payments online through Stripe and PayPal.
Parents pay through a secure hosted checkout, which means card details never touch your servers. Each payment is reconciled automatically against the right invoice, and the receipt goes out the instant the gateway confirms the payment through a webhook — no manual matching, no end-of-day cash counting. It works in both directions, too: subscription invoices where your institution pays GridX, and student fee invoices where parents pay you.
Online payments come as a subscription add-on, and you can switch it on for one institution without touching the others.
Reports that are ready for the boardroom
Every operational report in the system can now be exported to Excel (XLSX), PDF, and CSV. That covers attendance summaries, financial statements and fee collection reports, academic performance and result reports, and payroll summaries.
The documents are generated server-side, so what comes out is branded, paginated, and consistent whether someone opens it on a phone or prints it for a board meeting. PDF reports render in landscape A4 with proper table pagination, and every export respects your institution's currency. In other words, the format auditors and regulators actually expect to receive.
Advanced exports are an add-on built on a dedicated reports:export permission, so you decide exactly which staff are allowed to pull data out of the system.
Data privacy and GDPR, handled properly
If you hold data on students in the EU or UK, the law gives those students specific rights, and "we'll get to it" isn't a defensible answer. GridX SCM now ships proper tooling for the two core GDPR rights.
The right of access lets you export every record held about a student in a single action — profile, guardians, enrolments, fee accounts and invoices, attendance history, exam results, and the related audit-log entries. The right to erasure redacts the personal identifiers (name, email, phone, date of birth, address) while preserving financial and referential integrity, so your historical accounting stays intact and still balances. You're not blowing a hole in last year's books to satisfy a deletion request.
Every export and erasure is written to an immutable audit trail, and the whole capability sits behind a dedicated compliance:gdpr permission, so only an authorised data-protection officer can act on a subject request.
Add-ons you can assign per institution
Under the hood, GridX SCM runs on a single base plan plus à-la-carte add-ons. Each one unlocks a specific module and its permissions — LMS, Library, Hostel, Transport, Canteen, AI, SMS, and now Online Payments, Advanced Reports, and GDPR Compliance.
From the Tenants screen, the platform administrator can assign any add-on to any institution on demand. You can toggle module add-ons like Library or Online Payments on or off per institution, set quantities on capacity packs — extra students, staff users, storage — and watch the price total update live. The matching permissions activate automatically, so a tenant only ever sees the permissions for the add-ons it actually has.
The practical upshot: a school can start on the base plan and grow into the platform one capability at a time, and your team can provision exactly what each institution has paid for, instantly, without redeploying anything.
A front-end that fails gracefully
Every screen is now wrapped in a global error boundary. If a single component ever hits an unexpected error, the user gets a clean recovery screen with Try Again and Reload options instead of a blank page, and the rest of their session keeps working. Small change, but it's the difference between a minor hiccup and a support ticket.
Taken together, these four are the features schools tend to need most right after they've settled in — and now they're a toggle away. GridX SCM is cloud-based, multi-tenant, and billed monthly, so you can start with every module active and keep only the add-ons that earn their place.