Simption ERP

Problem

Educational institutions in India — schools, colleges, coaching centres — run on a chaotic mix of paper, Excel, and disconnected single-purpose tools. Existing SaaS ERPs are either prohibitively expensive (foreign vendors) or rigidly single-tenant (one install per institute, expensive to host, painful to update). SimptionTech needed a multi-tenant ERP that could serve 1000+ institutions from a single deployment, with hard tenant isolation for data safety and a modular structure so domain-specific features (library, transport, attendance) could be added without forking the codebase.

Architecture

Tenants resolve via subdomain (<institute>.simption.app). A custom TenantResolver looks up the tenant by host and bootstraps a per-tenant MySQL connection using stancl/tenancy v3.10. Each tenant gets an isolated database — no row-level multi-tenancy, no shared tables. A NoOpDatabaseManager was fitted on top of stancl/tenancy to accommodate a pre-existing legacy schema that pre-dated the multi-tenant migration.

A pluggable module system under app/Modules/* lets each domain feature (Students, Staff, Library, Assets, Stock, Security, Backup, Login, Dashboard, ...) ship its own service providers, Eloquent models, routes, Livewire components, and RBAC permissions through a single JSON config. New features land without touching the framework core, cutting feature rollout time by approximately 40%.

Key engineering decisions

• Isolated MySQL per tenant. Row-level multi-tenancy was rejected because the existing data model assumed full schema ownership; carrying that assumption into a shared-DB design would have required rewriting most of the app. Isolated DBs added provisioning complexity but kept every other module simple.
• Subdomain routing over path-based. Subdomains make SSL, branding, and tenant-aware cookies cleaner. The tenant context is established at the router level — application code never has to ask "which tenant is this?"
• Tenancy bootstrappers tuned to skip the cache-tag trap. Laravel 13's file-cache driver doesn't support tags, and tagged invalidation under Livewire serialization is fragile. The cache bootstrapper was made conditional on the active driver — file when developing, Redis when serving real tenants.
• RBAC via Spatie + per-module JSON config. Each module declares its own permissions; a single seeder writes them on tenant provisioning. New permissions ship with the module, not as a separate migration.
• Per-tenant configurable image upload pipeline. Resize/crop presets are stored in the tenant's own settings table, applied by a shared image service backed by AWS S3. School-vs-coaching aspect ratios get picked at upload time, not hardcoded.

Stack

Laravel 13, Livewire 4, MySQL, Redis, stancl/tenancy, Spatie's permission package, AWS S3, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Blade.

Links

• Live demo: collegedemo.simption.com
• Repository: private (company codebase)