Temple management software — sometimes sold as a “temple ERP” — covers very different jobs: a counter issuing receipts, an office scheduling sevas (offerings performed for devotees), a dharmashala (pilgrim rest-house) desk, a stores room, a property file, a messaging tool. No product does all of them equally well, and the right choice for a small village temple is not the right one for a devasthanam (temple administration) with fifteen counters. This checklist is written to be useful whichever vendor you pick — including if it is not us.
Start with your processes, not features
- List every place money or bookings come in: counters, office, website, kiosk, hundi (offering box), dharmashala, events.
- For each, write who does it, with what — receipt book, Excel, existing software — and what goes wrong today.
- Collect samples: a receipt, a seva register page, a day-end summary, a report the trustees ask for.
- Decide what must not change — for example, the receipt format your auditor knows, or the Panchang (Hindu almanac) your priests follow.
- Rank the problems. The first phase should fix the top two or three, not everything.
Requirements by area
Use this as a starting list. Delete what does not apply to your temple and add your own.
| Area | Questions that separate good from adequate |
|---|---|
| Counter and receipts | Can one receipt cover a family’s puja, donation and darshan ticket? Does it print on the printers you already own? How fast is a returning devotee’s lookup? |
| Sevas and the calendar | Can perpetual sevas fall on a tithi (lunar day) or nakshatra (birth star) instead of a fixed date? Whose Panchang does it use? |
| Devotee records | Which fields can you configure — gotra, nakshatra, “in memory of”? Can you import your current list? How are PAN and Aadhaar stored? |
| Website and kiosk | Do online and kiosk receipts share the counter’s ledger and numbering? Which payment gateways are supported? |
| Accounts | Does it reconcile gateway settlements and cheques with the bank? Does it export to your accounting package, and in what format? |
| Rooms and halls | Dormitory beds, deposits, refund slabs, housekeeping status, protection against double booking? |
| Stores and prasadam | Purchase approvals, a stock ledger, a jewellery register? |
| Property and documents | Land records, leases, tax due dates, court cases, reminders? |
| Messaging | Is SMS checked against DLT templates? Are WhatsApp templates supported? Who pays per message? |
| Live darshan | Does it use your existing cameras? Can it stream to YouTube at the same time? |
Receipt numbering is non-negotiable
Ask every vendor to show — not tell — what happens when an operator tries to edit or delete a receipt. The right answers are:
- Receipts cannot be edited after issue; corrections create a logged reversal or a new receipt.
- Numbering is sequential with no reuse, and can run separately per channel and per financial year.
- Cancelled receipts stay visible, with the reason and the approver.
- Reprints are marked as duplicates and logged.
If a supervisor can quietly “fix” a receipt, the audit trail your trustees rely on does not exist.
Roles, permissions and audit trail
- Can a counter operator see only their own counter’s collections?
- Can trustees have read-only access to reports?
- Is there an approval step for refunds, complimentary bookings and corrections — and is the person who raises a request prevented from approving it?
- Is every change logged with who, what and when, and can the log be exported?
- When the vendor’s support team enters your account, is that logged, and can you see why?
Languages and ease of use
The person at the counter decides whether the software succeeds. Check that their screens are available in the language they read most comfortably, that buttons are large and labels plain, and that a new volunteer can issue a correct receipt after a short training. Run the trial with the oldest member of your counter staff, not the youngest.
Your data, and your exit
Every temple changes software eventually. Before you sign, confirm in writing:
- You can export all receipts, devotees, sevas and bookings to Excel or CSV yourself, at any time, without asking the vendor.
- Exports include history, not just current records.
- The contract says the data belongs to the trust, and how it is returned or deleted when you leave.
- Where the data is stored, and who at the vendor can access it.
- Whether the vendor will import your existing registers — devotee lists, perpetual seva registers — and at what cost.
Understand the pricing model
| Model | How it works | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly subscription per module | Pay for the modules you use, often per temple or counter | Cost of extra seats, counters and temples; yearly increases |
| One-time licence plus AMC | An upfront fee, then an annual maintenance charge | What the AMC covers; cost of upgrades; who hosts it |
| Per transaction or percentage | A fee per receipt, or a share of online collections | How it scales in a festival month |
| Usage-based add-ons | Per SMS or WhatsApp message, receipt volume or camera | Unit rates, and whether prepaid credits expire |
Model the total cost over three years at your real volumes, including a festival month. Count payment gateway charges separately — they are paid to the gateway, not the software vendor.
Questions to ask every vendor
- Can we speak to a temple of our size that uses the product today?
- Which features in this demo are live, and which are planned? Please mark them in writing.
- What exactly does “80G support” mean here — printing our registration text on receipts, or filing statements? They are very different things.
- Does the product handle hundi counting, or only receipted collections?
- What happens to our data and our receipts if we stop paying?
- Who trains our staff, in which language, and on site or remotely?
- How do we reach support during a festival, and how quickly do you respond?
- Can we run a trial on our own sevas and receipts before we pay?
Red flags
- A feature list far longer than any demo can show.
- Customer counts and statistics you cannot check.
- No self-service data export.
- Receipts that an administrator can edit.
- A contract with automatic price rises or a charge to leave.
Run a proper trial
- Set up your ten most common sevas and donation types.
- Import a sample of your devotee list.
- Run one counter alongside the receipt book for a week, including a weekend.
- Compare the day’s totals between the two every evening.
- Have your accountant reconcile one week’s collections with the bank using the software’s reports.
- Ask the counter staff which they would keep.
Where Netra sits on this checklist
For counters and receipts, our product is Netra. Measured against this checklist: receipts are immutable and numbered by module, channel and Indian financial year, with controlled and logged reprints and corrections; one receipt can cover a family’s puja, donation and darshan ticket; Shashvat (perpetual yearly) sevas fall on a tithi or nakshatra from the temple’s own Panchang; there are 37 configurable devotee fields, with PAN and Aadhaar optional and stored encrypted; counter operators see only their own counter; and support access to your account needs a stated reason and is logged. It runs in English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati, exports to Excel, PDF and CSV, and has a three-month free trial; counter software is ₹999 a month after that, GST extra.
Where it falls short of this checklist: Netra does not count the hundi, does not file 80G statements, and its expenses and fund-accounting module is in early access. Rooms, live streaming, stores, property records and messaging are separate apps in our suite — see all products — and each deserves to be judged on its own against the questions above.
