DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN AUTOMATED SCHOOL FEES PAYMENT SYSTEM

1.0 Introduction

The essence for one going to school is for better survival tomorrow wherein becoming what he or she is capable of becoming what he or she wants in life. And the desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind and every human being whose mind is not debauched will be willing to give all that is required of him or her to get knowledge.

It is on this basic idea that knowledge oriented organization (school) has been set up as a ground for people to go in and learn in respond to paying for their acquired“knowledge for tomorrow’s success.

According to Oxford Dictionary of Current (6th Edition), fee is defined as an amount of money that one pay for professional services.

Simply put, school fee is that fixed interval payment made by a student or students to the school he or she attends.

From the definition, one can outline that school fee payment supposed to be in a regular interval that is timely, although sometime may not be that ready by the student due to some financial lapses.

Financial lapses poses a lot of problems to school management because of some pressing needs. However, when students refuse to pay their school fees on time the school management seems to lack money in the purse which at this render the management ineffective.

Apart from the management being ineffective financially, students also face barriers by not being allowed to write their examinations which is one of the academic frustration or setback. Using computer“ based system for fees payment necessitated this research in order to help solve this problems of either delayed fee payment, or the student not paying at all or the fee being misused/mismanaged or entangled with criminal attack either on the side of student at the course of payment or the side of bursary department/school management.

Using Anglican Girl’s Grammar School Awkunanaw, Enugustate as a case study, the research has the intention of creating a software that could process students school fees payment to Anglican Grammar girl’sbank accounts and electronically lodging individual students fees indicating name, department, registration number, level/class, date of payment, amount of money paid, academic session/semester/ bank’s name, account number, phone number, school name and other personal records etc. This will enhance prompt payment and safe delivery and automatically stop the management and students from being frustrated financially and otherwise.

1.1 Background Of The Study

Anglican Girl’s Grammar School, Awkunanaw, Enugu statewas founded in the year 1962 and started on the 15thMarch with twenty-nine students. later two morestudents arrived to make a total of thirty one

students. The pioneer Principal is Miss

J.O. Emelumadu (now Mrs. Muo). Three non-tutorialstaff were part of the foundation workers. they arenamely: Beatrice Aloanza (cook), Onam Nnji andNweke Ede(Watchmen). The school operates with the following levels JSS and SSS for the SSS science, commercial and art schools.

In this school, there is need for automated method of keeping data, more so a greater need for an automatic school fees payment system. This would go a long way in alleviating the various problems and stress involved in the manual method of school fees payment and clearance in the institution. Moreover, the issue of delayed youth service as a result of inability to complete the tedious manual process of clearance which involves school fees clearance would be curtailed when this new system is implemented.

Hence it became imperative for a school fees system to eliminate the shortcomings of the manual system in place.

These days every sector is known with the word-computer. We can find computers at everywhere around us. In fact modern world will be incomplete without computers and their applications. It’s almost impossible to even imagine the modern facilities without the use of computers. For many individuals computer means PC, on which they can see movies, play games, prepare office sheets and manage daily planners. But this is just a page of the book of computers.

Computer means much more than a PC. A computer can simply be defined as a machine which takes instructions and perform computations and operations accordingly. These commanded instructions are known as programs and computers execute these programs to do an operation. At a time, a set of instructions can be given to a computer to perform several operations, simultaneously. This feature is a point of distinction for the computers.

Many types of computers are available these days. Depending on their usage and service application they can be classified in various categories. Supercomputers are capable of doing trillions of calculations in fraction of seconds, so they are used as controlling units of banking transactions; to keep records of railway, in schools to monitor school fees payment system in the bursary department and air transportations; to conduct decent flow of telecommunication and many more complex operations can be controlled, organized and conducted by using supercomputers.

On the other hand computers are also used in conducting simple operations like billing, ticket transactions, record maintenance, security analysis etc. And even computers (PC) are also used to do home based general activities like office sheet maintenance, day planner, entertainment etc. So computers are involved in every sector of life with different forms and different applications.

In modern word everything around us like GPS, ATM machines, cell phones, petrol pumps, portable play stations and all other modern devices use computer controlling units to conduct their featured operations. This simply implies that, when this new mode of operation is implemented in the bursary department of Our Saviour institute of Science, Agriculture and technology using computer the process will be efficient and free from error

1.2 Statement Of The Problem

The processes of manual school fees for student in the school has resulted to a lot of problems which makes student not to write exams on time because of the slow rate of processing the school fess from the bursary department was done manually. And sometimes lead to the misplacement of the school fees tellers because of lack of adequate storage medium.

1.3 Objectives Of The Study

The objectives of this project include:

1. To provide a reliable and transparent system devoid of personal inclinations and interest
2. To provide borderless access
3. To alleviate the problems and stress of travelling and queuing up of students during clearance in the bursary department due to manual process of school fees payment.

1.4 Significance Of The Study

The project work will help in a good number of ways to ease the queuing system in the polytechnic as the online clearance and school fees payment system will help students to achieve whatever they want to achieve without coming to the various offices for clearance and fees.

The automated school fees system will allows the students to check their school fees status if they are in any way indebted to the school, fill and submit their school fees form, and obtain their clearance form for that semester.

1.5 Scope Of The Study

This research work is limited to school fees payment and clearance system for the student of the Girl’s grammar secondary school, Awkunanaw, Enugu. The software developed will be carried out using Visual Basic, MS Access, so as to manage both the database and at the same time make the software.

1.6 Limitations Of The Study

Some of the constraints that my have in one-way or another affected the outcome of this work include:

Resources: Is not free as the cost of hardware, software, website design, online distribution cost, maintenance of your site and time, all these factored into the cost of providing your product and service can be of limitation to this study.

Power supply: Availability of stable, efficient and reliable power supply is also a source of limitation this project as it depend only on source of energy to keep functioning

The bandwidth, which mean how quickly information travels between the computer where your web site is located (your Web server), and the visitor’s computer. Even though 56.6kbps modems, and even 10Mbps cable modems are becoming more common, many people on the internet are still using 28.8kbps modems.

Also this research work was faced with a lot of difficulties. Time constraint was one of the limiting factors in carrying out this study.

Financial constraint also constituted in carrying out an in depth study of this project. Limitations to the extent in which data could be collected also constituted a problem.

Irregularities in power supply also dealt harshly with the researcher.

In spite of the above mentioned difficulties, some data was collected which will be analysed later.

1.7 Definition Of Terms

Computer Network:

Computer Network is a system that connects two or more computers together using a communication link. (Bufts 1989) World Wide Web: World Wide Web simply called www is the most important tool of the Internet. (Jeff 20010)

Clearance letter:

Official certification of blamelessness, trustworthiness, or suitability for graduation and issue of certificates in degree course. ( Gabreal 1990)

Databases:

A systematically arranged collection of computer data, structured so that it can be automatically retrieved or manipulated. It is also called databank. (Adoca 2001)

File Transfer:

Any kind of computer file can be sent via the Internet from one Internet user to another. Table of accounts on spreadsheets, design by a graphic artists, music sound files etc, can all be exchanged in this way. (Smith 1999)

Web Browser:

This is a special kind of software that processes hypertext make-up language (HTML) document. In other words, a web browser is a computer program that interprets HTML command to collect, arranged and display the parts of a web page. (Cleff 2000)

Web Site:

A website is a collection of many interconnected web pages organized by a specific college, organization company etc, containing web pages (good and commodities) on the Internet. Web site are stored on web servers. There are many web site and thousand of HTML pages on each web site. A web site is a treasure of information and entertainment. ( Donald 1986)

Hyperlinks:

Hyperlinks are highlighted words and phrase you find on web documents that you can click on as to jump to some other documents or Internet services. ( Clex 1990)

Offline:

Disconnected from computer network; describes a computer terminal or peripheral device disconnected from a computer network. (Wikipedia 2011)

System:

Set of computer components that is, an assembling of hardware, software and peripherals functioning together. ( Fans 2011)