With residential schools becoming increasingly popular with parents and students alike, educational institutions are tasked with not just managing academics but also student life. When it comes to hostel life, of paramount importance for any school or college is student safety and comfort. Good record management and flawless execution of administrative tasks associated with hostel management is key to ensuring this.
Being able to keep track of students in the system helps administrators keep track of where they are and locate them swiftly in case of exigencies. It also helps create a record of where a student is supposed to be for their non-educational caretakers, and help them more efficiently utilize non-school hours.
A hostel that runs like a well-oiled machine provides a sense of security and comfort to a student. After all, during the academic year, their room is their private sanctum and their roommates and fellow hostelites their family. A hostel and its inhabitants, in many ways, are a home away from home. Ensuring that is managed well is thus essential. Paatham helps in keeping track of student records and their housing details are unreliable, expensive, cumbersome and prone to human error. Gone are the days of dusty ledgers filled with cramped writing that can only be interpreted with the help of the original author. Instead, a robust hostel management system can inexpensively and quickly take over a majority of hostel management duties, reducing labour costs and improving overall efficiency.
But what are the must-have features of a good hostel management system to ensure you are getting your money’s worth? Here are the features we can’t do without:
A good hostel management system will allow you to easily add and delete hostels as needed to the system. This ensures that an administrator has a bird’s eye view of all existing hostels on campus at any moment – and access to the detailed records for each individual hostel. This also ensures longevity for your hostel management system. As your educational institution grows,
so do its needs, including housing. Being able to easily add, delete, and manage hostels in the system ensures it does not quickly become obsolete.
Having a compatible roommate can make or break a student’s life. The methodology used to assign students to rooms varies from school to school. In some cases, a questionnaire is used to match compatible students while some rely on random assignment. If the latter results in feuding roommates, it is seen as an opportunity for personal growth in the conflict management space. But how does one keep track of these assignments, any changes requested, and maintain a roommate archive? A room assignment feature is thus necessary for any good hostel management system. Paatham, for instance, makes it easy for administrators to assign rooms, process room change requests and keep a track of their student’s life.
To the Hostel warden and other hostel employees, such a system allows for smooth flow of information and easy access to specific tasks. They can easily manage tasks such as inventory management, room information, room allocation, schedule fee collections, collect hostel fees and track fee defaulters. The addition of custom fields allows for easy recording of additional information if need.
For students, it offers an easy option to choose a room based on their preferences and requirements.
Hostel fees are charged separately from the tuition and other school expenses a student is expected to pay. This is a sensitive financial issue for most students since the consequences of defaulting are dire – a hostel is the student’s home during the school year. Managing hostel fee collection is a sensitive and confidential matter, best handled by the efficiency and anonymity a hostel management system has to offer. A hostel management system enables administrators to post the fee due for each individual student, what their payment status is, update payment status easily, and access a list of defaulters in one click, in order to ensure that finances are in order.
In conclusion, managing a hostel through traditional data management is a tedious task and efficiently leveraging a school software offers a dynamic as well as practical approach. It helps hostels with precise inventory planning, offers a systematic approach and ensures accurate control of administrative processes to ensure that the hostel is able to function at its highest capability.