One record, read by everyone
The office, the classroom and the family should be looking at the same thing. No re-keying, no version a week behind, no export to reconcile on a Friday.
Commun was designed in a school office, sitting beside the people doing the work. Every part of it is used every day by a real international school in Malaysia before any of it is sold to another one.
A school hands over the names, addresses and marks of every child it teaches, and the bank details of every family.
Every school is its own tenant. A question asked inside one school cannot reach another school’s students, bills or marks — the separation is in the way the data is read, not in a setting anyone can switch off.
Access is granted by role, to the page. A form tutor sees their form. The Finance Manager sees the ledger. The Head sees both. Nobody sees anything by accident, and every role is yours to change.
Who changed what, and when. A discount applied, a mark amended, a bill written off — the entry outlives the person who made it, which is what a board and an auditor both want.
Staff and families sign in with a one-time code sent to the e-mail address or phone number the school already holds. There is no shared staffroom password to write on a sticky note or hand to a leaver.
Commun is built to be available at all times and is watched continuously, with copies of your records taken automatically and kept apart from the running system. The days that matter — results day, the first week of term, the last week of fee season — are the days we plan the year around.
Your school’s records are stored in Singapore, an hour from Johor Bahru rather than on the other side of the world, and student and guardian data is handled under Malaysia’s Personal Data Protection Act 2010. Read the notice.
That is the short version. Security & privacy has the long one — sign-in, the audit trail, where the data lives, and what happens if something goes wrong.
Phoebe Gan was sitting in a music academy’s office in 2013 when she saw how it really worked: enrolments in one book, fees in another, and every reminder to a parent typed out by hand on a Sunday night. She built them something better, and never left this work.
Ten years on, the same Sunday night was waiting in an international school — five systems and a spreadsheet that did not agree with one another. The Finance Manager’s billing, the teacher’s gradebook and the parent’s portal each held a version of the same child, and each was a little out of date.
Commun is what she founded to end it. It runs that school every day, which is why a feature that would irritate the admissions office does not survive long here.
What that means in practice. We build to the Malaysian office first: MyInvois before a second dashboard, three languages before a fourth chart, the National stream beside Cambridge because a school here needs both.
It also means we describe the product as it is today, not as it is meant to be next quarter.
We would rather be believed than admired.
They show up in the product more than in the company. They are the reasons we make the choices we make, including the unpopular ones.
The office, the classroom and the family should be looking at the same thing. No re-keying, no version a week behind, no export to reconcile on a Friday.
MyInvois, FPX, the ringgit to the sen and three languages are not a Malaysian edition of something built elsewhere. They were the first requirements, not the last.
Isolation, roles, the audit trail and an automatic backup are not an upgrade tier. A school that cannot trust the record cannot use the system at all.
A system used by a Head, a form tutor and a grandmother collecting a child has to make sense to all three. Where clarity and cleverness disagree, clarity wins.
A walkthrough on the pillar your office lives in, with the questions your IT lead and your board will ask answered in the same half hour.