Comparison
First IMS vs spreadsheets, argued honestly
Most pages like this one pretend spreadsheets are useless. They are not, and a school running on them well is not doing anything wrong. There are two things they cannot do, and one question that tells you whether those two things matter to you yet.
Start here
What a spreadsheet genuinely does well
Worth saying first, because any comparison that skips this part is selling rather than explaining.
It costs almost nothing and needs no training
Every member of staff already knows how to use one. There is no rollout, no licence negotiation, and nobody needs anyone's approval to start on Monday.
It does more than vendors admit
A free mail-merge add-on will take a sheet of marks, produce a personalised report card for every student and email each one to the right parent. Version history will tell you which cell changed and who changed it. Conditional formatting will flag a run of Monday absences.
It bends to your school, not the other way round
No software company decided what your columns are called or which curriculum you run. For a school doing something unusual, that freedom is worth a great deal, and it is the thing most systems take away.
The two real limits
What no amount of spreadsheet skill fixes
These are not complaints about effort. They are properties of what a file is.
- A file permission has two settings
- Your safeguarding lead needs every incident logged about a child. A head of department needs their own department and nothing else. A supply teacher needs Thursday's register and nothing else at all. A file cannot express that, because access to a file is a yes or a no. Splitting the sensitive material into its own restricted folder does give you the permissions, and it costs you the single record, because the child now exists in two places joined by a link somebody has to maintain. Permissions or one record. There is no third arrangement.
- Editing is recorded, reading is somewhere else
- Version history answers who changed a cell. It does not answer who opened the file and read it. Google Workspace does record view events, in Drive log events in the admin console, behind the Audit and Investigation privilege, and only on paid editions such as Education Standard and Education Plus. So the record usually exists, in a console your safeguarding lead cannot open, in a search nobody runs until something has already gone wrong, and never attached to the child it concerns.
- Two copies are two versions of the truth
- The moment a second person needs their own copy, or last year's file is duplicated to start this year, you have two documents that disagree. Neither is wrong. Working out which is current becomes a job, and it is a job with no name that nobody is timetabled for. It scales with the number of files rather than with the number of students.
The test
How to tell which side of the line you are on
Four questions. If you answer no to all of them, you do not have this problem yet and you should not be buying anything.
Does answering one parent's question about one afternoon mean opening more than two files?
Is there a person in your office who is quietly responsible for making two files agree, without that being anybody's job title?
Could a supply teacher, today, open something they should not be able to open?
If a file of sensitive notes went to the wrong person this afternoon, would you find out, and could you say afterwards who had read it?
A yes to the first two is a cost question, and it grows with every file you add. A yes to either of the last two is not a cost question at all.
If you do move
The part we would rather tell you now
Your records are not clean, and nobody's are. Two spellings of the same student, a leaver who was never marked as one, three years of marks in whatever format made sense to the person who built the file. All of it surfaces during import, and it surfaces as your problem even though the software you are moving to did not cause it. Any vendor calling that effortless has not looked at your data. We would rather do the work with you than hand over a template and wish you luck, which is why the import is part of onboarding rather than a separate fee.
Questions
The things schools ask first
What is First IMS?
One system for running a school. Attendance, student and staff records, assessment, reports, safeguarding, HR, invoicing and parent communication, all reading from the same records rather than from separate files that have to be reconciled.
How much does it cost?
Core is $0.75 per student per month and Growth is $1.00. Larger and multi-campus schools are quoted on the Custom plan. There is no separate implementation fee, and your existing records are imported as part of onboarding rather than billed as a project.
What happens to the data we already have?
It comes across as part of onboarding. Student and staff records, historic attendance and assessment data all import, and we would rather do that work with you than hand you a template and wish you luck. Send us a sample export and we will tell you honestly what maps cleanly and what does not.
How is safeguarding data protected?
NEST is a module inside First IMS rather than a separate tool, so a safeguarding note is attached to the student record but visible only to the roles that should see it. Every note records who has read it. Access is configurable per school.
Can it handle more than one campus?
Yes, on the Custom plan, which also covers white labelling. If you run two sites today and a third next year, say so early and we will set the structure up for that from the start.
Can we try it before committing?
Yes. We will set you up on a demo school with your own subjects and year groups rather than ours, so you are looking at something that resembles your timetable. Ask for a demo and we reply within one working day.
Tell us what your school actually runs on
Send us the spreadsheet you dread opening and we will show you what it looks like once it stops being a spreadsheet. We reply within one working day.