Shamim Grammar School

Before EduPortal, collecting fees at Shamim Grammar School was a manual exercise repeated from scratch every month. Vouchers were prepared by hand for a roll of more than 1,200 students, which made the start of each fee cycle one of the busiest points in the school calendar.

Once vouchers were out, the office had no quick way to see who had paid and who had not. Identifying defaulters meant working through records one at a time, so the picture was always a little out of date by the time it was assembled.

Reminders to parents were handled separately again, from contact numbers kept in spreadsheets. Those lists had to be maintained by hand alongside the school's own records, which left room for numbers to fall out of date or be missed entirely. As the school's owner put it, fee season was “our nightmare every month”.

Automated fee billing. Vouchers are now generated from the student records EduPortal already holds, so a whole class or a single student can be billed without anyone re-entering names, sections or amounts.

Defaulter lists. Outstanding fees are read from the same live data as the vouchers themselves. The office sees who has not paid as a current list rather than something reconstructed by hand each month.

SMS reminders. Messages to parents are sent directly from EduPortal over the school's own SIM messaging, using the contact numbers already attached to each student record. The separate spreadsheets that previously held those numbers are no longer part of the process.

The school reports that its cash flow changed within the first term of running fees through EduPortal. Automated vouchers, defaulter lists and SMS reminders together removed the monthly rebuild that fee season had previously involved, and gave the office a single current view of what was outstanding.

Because billing, defaulter tracking and parent messaging now read from the same student records, the three no longer have to be reconciled against one another — which was where much of the manual effort had gone.