Financial management is a term which has been in wide use in business and commercial circles for many years but has been applied to education more recently. Financial management has changed significantly in recent years and has become progressively more important and more complex.
With regard to the use of term Financial management in Education, it deals with the proper allocation of funds (fee) and its proper utilization on students’ learning that enhances the internal efficiency of schools. Managing the financial department of any organization is cumbersome and when it comes to an educational institute it is an onerous task. Whether you are highly experienced or if you very good knowledge of accounts or if you can easily make changes to fee structures, create fee heads, receive payments and generate fee dues etc., you still end up in errors.
To manage the loopholes and overcome the limitations, there was the need for a fee management software that helps you manage the fee process and financial department avoiding hassles. These are the 10 key functions that a school should look for in Fee Collection module of school management software:
- Online Fee Payment: The Fee collection module should furnish a provision to pay the school fee online. With digital transactions being the current trend, every fee module should provide the above facility for online fee payment.
- Integrated SMS Alert: The entity should be integrated with SMS feature i.e, timely alerts should be sent to parents about the due date and also an intimation or notification upon successful fee payment.
- Receipt Generation: It should be able to generate an automated receipt after fee payment and also generate previous fee receipts. It should be compatible with both laser printers and dot matrix printer enabling you to use your existing print technology rather than investing in new one.
- Mode Of Payment: The system should offer different modes of payment to parents like payment through cash, cheque, challan, debit card, credit card and net banking. It should allow the parents to pay the fee at their comfort and feasibility.
- Report Collection: The system should be capable of generating defaulters list in a single click. It should generate reports that give insight into fee collections, income collection and financial transactions.
- Penalty Automation: The fee collection module should be incorporated with a penalty automation feature in its module, that automatically allocates a fee penalty post due date. Rather than calculating the fine manually, the system automatically calculates the fine and shows it to the user.
- Service based Fee: The fee module should be able to handle service-based fee like transport or library etc. For example, a student opting to use transport or library for a particular period of time would be charged with the fee for that duration during which the services were utilized by the student.
- Miscellaneous Fee: The system should be able to handle miscellaneous fee of the school and track all costs involved in such utilities.
- Concession Fee: All fee-related discounts and concessions should be calculated and allocated automatically by the tool. Staff concessions or student concessions, the fee collection module should make tracking all such concessions highly simple.
- Multiple Accounting: This is the main feature of any fee module in the school management software. For institutes maintaining multiple bank accounts, the fee module should facilitate ease of auditing and tracking of income and expenditure across all bank accounts with detailed ledgers.
