Sai Ram Coaching has run 11 batches out of one floor in Ameerpet, Hyderabad since 2015. Until last year, everything about fees lived in a single Google Sheet titled 'Fees_Final_v37'. Nine years of monthly chasing, copy-pasted from October to November to December.
The starting state
Eleven batches. 312 students. Three accountants. One Excel sheet that everyone edited simultaneously. The owner — Mr Reddy — spent every Sunday afternoon reconciling between bank statements, the sheet, and the WhatsApp screenshots his accountants had taken during the week.
By the time he closed his books each month, three weeks of the next month had already passed. The institute was profitable. It was just slow, opaque, and emotionally heavy.
Week one on Feezy
We migrated the 312 active students in one CSV import on a Tuesday. By Friday, the team had configured 11 batches, 3 fee heads, and the monthly recurrence rules. On Saturday morning the first cycle of branded payment links went out on WhatsApp.
By Sunday night, 184 students had paid. Mr Reddy spent his Sunday afternoon with his daughter instead of the spreadsheet.
90 days in
The numbers across the first quarter: average days-past-due dropped from 11.3 to 2.9. Accountant hours spent on collection fell from 22 hours a week to 7. Late-payment penalties collected (because they were finally applied automatically) rose 38%. And nobody asked Mr Reddy 'sir, did Aarav's parent pay?' for three months straight.
What we'd do differently
Mr Reddy's one regret: he should have moved earlier. He spent nine years building a coaching institute and the last two years of the spreadsheet era were not building — they were maintaining. Migration was a Tuesday afternoon. Maintenance was nine years.
