With the invention of commute, cities have come closer and there is no phobia of taking education in far cities nowadays. Many big educational institutes are now offering residential facility so that students that do not belong to the city can also enroll themselves in the institute. Either they are availing the facility of online education or they are opting for a hostel facility. The discipline, organization skills enhance the students’ soft skills.

From an administration perspective, it is a very tedious task to manage the hostel and its related operations. As they have the responsibility of the students, streamlined and organized management is mandatory. The traditional register-pen method lacks many aspects and hostel administration looks for a better option. The hostel management system is the best system software that fulfills all hostel management requirements.

What is Hostel management software?

Hostel Management System is a comprehensive software that is designed by understanding the requirements of the hostel operation and management. As hostel operations involve the regular update of data eliminating the redundancy factor, the service providers should thoroughly understand the hostel operations first. With the advancement of educational methodologies, it is imperative for schools to provide efficient ways of residential accommodation management. The technology has again played the role of saviour and comes to their rescue with the efficient hostel management Software.

In the conventional method of hostel management, labour or pen-paper methods are used. As hostel management requires continuous supervision, there is loads of burden on the administrative staff. This management system will cut down the load and mundane paperwork as the system will accomplish the work on their behalf.

Flaws of manual hostel management

Manual hostel management depends upon manpower and pen-paper, the human intervention comes with several limitations in carrying out the responsibilities with efficiency. Here are some of the limitations of a manual hostel management system:

• Manually-driven hostel management lacks to streamline the management and develops burden on the administrative staff.
• As student data such as in, out timings are updated frequently, manual hostel management has limitations of updating the timings and can cause errors in recording the timings.
• There is no security of data in a manual system and anyone can tamper with the data.
• Hostel administration needs to bear cost overhead for maintaining staff for managing records and other administrative work.
• Students cannot pay online fees for the hostel, mess, and other facilities, they need to carry the cash in person which has fear of loss or stealing.
• Easy reporting is not possible in the manual system, the staff needs to check various registers manually to retrieve data whenever necessary.

Hostel management software overcomes all these flaws and facilitates the hostel runners an advanced way of management. The features provided by the software are attracting the hostel administrators to implement it. Here are some of the features that underline the importance of this management system in the school:

Hassle-free room allocation

One of the most cumbersome tasks of hostel management is room allocation. The process is tedious as it needs to check the room availability, sharing-basis criteria and other aspects. The hostel management system gives you a real-time view of rooms allocation so that hostel staff can allocate a room to students without any clashes.

Easy rent calculations

The hostel rents are paid either on a monthly, half-yearly, or yearly basis. Calculations of room rents is an overhead for the hostel administrators as they need to keep a record per room, per-student basis. This management software provides an easy way to calculate the room rent as the software stores all the related data in a single repository. Some advanced systems even send notifications to parents registered mobile numbers and warden about fee due dates. This can be helpful for both entities to track the room rent easily.

Student arrival and departure management

The hostel administration has the responsibility of the students as they are residing there. So, maintaining a record of students’ attendance and in-out timings is mandatory for them. This is helpful in keeping a tab on students’ behavior and whereabouts. Integration of This management system with third-party software like biometric or RFID can give you real-time data of students’ arrival and departure timings.

Visitor Management

It comprises different interrelated modules and visitor management is one of those modules. Every hostel has its own rules of visitor management. Keeping a tab on visitor ensure the student safety and liability. This module can be enriched with different reports that retrieve the data about visitors on a monthly, weekly, per-student basis.

Mess management

Almost every hostel has its own mess. This management system with a mess management module offers an easy way to monitor the mess activities. The interrelated activities like grocery, menu management, and staff duty allocation are managed by the system itself so that the staff can concentrate on students to the fullest.

Keeping parents in the loop

Hostel administration is the liability of the students in absence of parents but it is mandatory to convey to the parents about the progress, activities of their kids. Keeping the parents in the loop will ensure them also about their kid’s safety. It efficiently accomplishes this work by sending different reminders like attendance, outing records, fee reminders.

Issue the gate pass

To go outside the hostel, hostel students require a valid gate pass. Issuing gate pass to students for valid reasons and keeping the track of them is a major liability of the hostel management. This can impact the security of the students so the hostel management system develops a facility to issue a valid gate pass and validate it so that there is no unauthorized access.

Providing a hostel facility is the need for the hour. As many parents are looking for better quality education and they are not hesitating to enroll their kids outside the city also. So, quality education is not restricted by geographical boundaries. As the responsibility of the hostel administration is high, this Management System provides an effective way to accomplish the responsibilities.