Salesforce as a Student Information System
After a homegrown SIS: the student record on Salesforce.
A custom system fits perfectly on the day it ships, and ages with the people who built it. San Francisco Bay University replaced its homegrown SIS in 2025 — its record, registration, grading and compliance reporting now run on a platform that outlives any one team.
In production
This migration has already been done.
San Francisco Bay University replaced a homegrown SIS in 2025. Its student record — registration, academic records, student finance and compliance reporting — runs on Salesforce Education Cloud today, with real students registering in real terms on the system this page describes.
What runs natively
Everything a homegrown SIS holds today, native.
The record of truth moves whole. In our deployments these run natively on Salesforce — configured on the platform, not built beside it.
- Registration
- Prerequisite enforcement, section capacity and waitlists.
- Grading
- Grade entry, grade rolls and grade-change workflow.
- GPA and academic standing
- Computed in the platform, not imported into it.
- Official transcripts
- Produced natively; delivered through your existing service.
- Course catalog and class scheduling
- Terms, sessions, sections, rooms and times.
- Degree audit
- Degree progress and what-if analysis.
- Transfer credit
- Articulation rules, not just stored evaluations.
- Student financials
- Fee assessment, accounts receivable, payments and refunds.
Financial aid stays in the system your aid office trusts — live integrations with PowerFAIDS, Regent and Campus Ivy tie aid status into the same student record. Reporting and compliance run natively, by jurisdiction.
What changes day to day
What the institution gains that it cannot build for itself.
A system built in-house got the institution here, and usually for years longer than anyone expected. Four things change when the record moves onto a platform.
- The knowledge stops living in one head
- How the institution works becomes configuration anyone with permission can read, audit and change. What one or two people have carried for years is written down by the act of building it.
- Patching becomes somebody else’s job
- Security maintenance runs continuously as part of the platform, at a standard set by the banking, healthcare and government workloads that share the infrastructure. No dependency reaches end of life on your watch.
- You can hire for it
- The skills are current, taught and plentiful. Filling the role is a job posting rather than a search for someone willing to learn a stack that exists at one institution.
- The system stops being the reason for no
- A new program, a new modality, a new partnership — configuration rather than a development project competing with everything else the team owes the institution.
Ten months, typically — for institutions under 10,000 students.
Institution size drives the timeline, and larger or more structurally complex institutions take longer — we will tell you where you fall in the first conversation. For context, the industry norm for an SIS replacement is measured in years.
Common questions
Moving off a homegrown SIS.
Our system was built here and it works. Why change it?
Often the honest answer is not yet. Institutions we talk to are usually moving because of something they want to do next — a new program, a new delivery model, a merger, a scale of enrollment the system was not shaped for — rather than because the system failed. If nothing is pressing against it, that is a reasonable position and we will say so.
Much of the logic lives with one or two people. How is that captured?
By working alongside them. The discovery phase is largely the exercise of getting what those colleagues know into a documented, configured form — which is also the point at which the institution stops depending on their availability. In our experience they are the most valuable people on the project and the most relieved by it.
Can we keep any of what we built?
The logic, usually yes — the rules, the exceptions, the local conventions that make your institution work are exactly what gets configured. The code, usually no, and that is the intended outcome. What was a bespoke application becomes configuration on a platform other people maintain.
Parts of our stack are out of support. Does that complicate the migration?
It is common and it is workable. Data is extracted from the database rather than through the application, so an unsupported runtime, an old framework or a server nobody wants to restart does not block the migration. It does argue for starting the conversation sooner, because the extraction is easiest while the people who know the system are still there.
Insights & events
On this migration.
Case study · Sep 25, 2025
How SFBU Meets its Mission Through Adoption of Salesforce as an SIS
How San Francisco Bay University moved from paper-based silos to Salesforce as a full SIS, cutting manual work by 80% and growing domestic enrollment.
Article · Feb 23, 2026
Is Your Institution One Resignation Away from a Crisis? The Hidden Risk Inside CAMS SIS
When CAMS know-how lives in one staff member's head, the registrar's office is one resignation from crisis. What that risk looks like and how to reduce it.
Case study · Dec 9, 2025
Aligning Systems with Strategy at Unity Environmental University
How Unity Environmental University migrated off an aging on-prem CAMS SIS to Salesforce, building the agile, AI-ready core its Enterprise Model demanded.
Start here
Bring us your a homegrown SIS reality.
Your contract dates, your academic calendar, your integrations, whatever your registrar worries about most. A discovery call is a working conversation with people who have moved institutions onto Salesforce — we will tell you candidly whether this is a fit.