Hostel Management
Run a boarding house properly — who sleeps where, who is in tonight, who is owed for, and what is broken — on the same record as the classroom.
What this module is
Boarding is the part of a school with the highest duty of care and the worst tooling. Bed allocations live in a spreadsheet that one person maintains; the exeat book is a physical book; maintenance is a note passed to the caretaker; and the boarding fee is reconciled against the tuition ledger by hand at the end of term. Every one of those is a small administrative annoyance right up to the evening somebody cannot say whether a child is in the house.
Hostel Management models the building itself — houses, floors, rooms and individual bed spaces — and then hangs everything else off it. A boarder occupies a named bed, so occupancy is a fact rather than an estimate. Roll call is taken against that bed list. A leave pass is attached to the boarder who holds it, and everyone who needs to know is notified when it is requested, approved and returned. A repair is raised against the room it belongs to.
The module divides into six surfaces for the boarding team — occupancy, residents, directory, safety, maintenance and finance — with a “My Hostel” area for the boarder, and the child’s house and open leave passes on the ward page for parents. What follows walks each role through the screens they actually use.
What you get
Occupancy you can trust
Every bed space has its own state — occupied, available, reserved or under maintenance — so the free-bed count is derived from the building rather than remembered.
Roll call against the bed list
The nightly count is taken against who is allocated where, and separates present from legitimately on leave from overdue back — which is the difference between a headcount and a safeguarding record.
The exeat book, digitised
Leave passes are requested, approved or refused, and signed back in, with everyone notified at each step. The paper book stops being the only place a child’s whereabouts is written down.
Boarding fees on the school’s ledger
Fees are generated per hostel from room-type rates, with discounts and penalties, and issued into the same finance ledger as tuition. Overdue reminders go to guardians and wardens automatically.
Repairs raised against a room, not a rumour
Maintenance carries severity, an assignee and a cost, attached to the room it concerns — and preventive jobs and room inspections are scheduled nightly rather than by memory.
A visitor log worth having
Who came, who they came to see, who approved it, when they arrived and when they left — with same-gender and visiting-hour policies set per school.
How Hostel Management actually works
Everything below is the real application, running live on this page with sample school data — not screenshots. Each screen is the same one your team would use.
Boarding team & house staff
The boarding team runs the module. These six screens are the job: know the state of the houses, place the boarders, maintain the physical map, keep everyone safe overnight, fix what breaks, and collect what is owed.
Start with occupancy
The overview is a bed-level occupancy picture across every house, which is the number the boarding team is asked for most often and can least afford to guess.
Place the boarders
The resident registry is who lives in the house. Every row is a pupil in a named bed, with their fee standing beside them.
Maintain the physical map
The directory is the building: houses, then rooms, then individual bed spaces. Everything else in the module points at it, which is why it is worth getting right once.
Keep the house safe overnight
The safety screen is the duty-of-care record: roll call, leave, visitors and incidents in one place, because at 9pm they are one job.
Fix what breaks
Maintenance is where boarding costs money and where habitability is either defended or lost. Every job is attached to the room it concerns.
Collect the boarding fee
Boarding is billed separately from tuition but must not be reconciled separately. This screen sets the rates, generates the charges and records what comes in.
Boarders
A boarder’s questions are small and constant: which bed is mine, who am I with, do I owe anything, is my exeat approved, and has anybody fixed the fan. “My Hostel” answers all five without a queue outside the house office.
Their own house at a glance
The boarder lands on their house, room and bed, with their fee standing, their leave-pass counts and any open maintenance request they have raised.
The allocation itself
The full detail of where they are placed — house, room, bed space, the state of the assignment and the date they were assigned.
What boarding costs them
The boarding charges raised against them, what has been paid and what is outstanding — the same figures the bursary sees, so a disputed balance is a shorter conversation.
Request and track an exeat
A boarder requests leave with a reason and a window, and watches it move to approved, rejected or returned — instead of asking whether the house master has signed the book yet.
Report what is broken
A boarder raises a fault against their own room and follows it to completion — which is what turns a corridor complaint into a tracked job.
Parents & guardians
A boarding parent needs two things and no login to a boarding system: to know where their child sleeps, and to be told when they are out of the house. Both sit on the ward page, and the notifications arrive on their own.
Boarding on the ward page
A ward’s page states whether they are a resident, which house and room they are in, and how many leave passes are open — beside attendance, results, library and clinic.
How it connects to the rest of the platform
Boarders are the school’s existing pupils
A resident is a pupil record with a bed attached. Admissions, transfers and leavers flow through, and a boarder’s year group, guardians and attendance are the same ones the rest of the school uses.
Boarding fees reach the finance ledgerrequires School Fees & Finance
Generated hostel fees are issued as ledger events under the hostel module, so boarding income, payments and adjustments report alongside tuition rather than in a parallel spreadsheet.
Guardian and warden notifications are automatic
Leave-pass changes and fee reminders are dispatched through the shared notification service to the guardians already recorded against the boarder, and to the active wardens of the house.
The house knows the medical picturerequires Health & Clinic Management
A resident profile carries medical, dietary and special-needs summaries; where the clinic module is running, the pupil’s full health record and clinic history sit on the same child.
Access control treats boarding as its own module
Hostel actions live in their own permission namespace, so a house master can run allocations and leave without touching finance or academic records.
Common questions
Do we have to model every individual bed?+
Yes, and it is the point. Bed spaces are what make occupancy, allocation, roll call and maintenance accurate rather than approximate. Rooms and bed spaces can both be bulk-imported, so setting up a large estate is a single upload rather than a week of data entry.
Can we run mixed, boys’ and girls’ houses with different rules?+
Yes. Each house has its own type, capacity, warden, rules and room mix, and the school sets visiting hours, a same-gender visitor policy and a curfew window centrally.
How does roll call work?+
It is taken against the bed list for a given date and classifies every resident as present, on leave, or overdue back — using the approved leave passes to distinguish an authorised absence from an unexplained one.
Are boarding fees separate from school fees?+
They are set and generated separately — per house, by room type, with discounts and penalties — but they are issued into the same finance ledger, so the school reports one set of income rather than two.
Can boarders request leave themselves?+
Yes. A boarder requests an exeat with a reason and a window from their own portal; the boarding team approves or rejects it, and the boarder is signed back in on return. Guardians are notified at each step.
What happens when a boarder leaves mid-term?+
They are checked out from the resident registry, which frees the bed space immediately and keeps their allocation history, fees and leave record attached to their pupil record.
Other specialized modules
Run your whole school on one connected platform
Start with the base package, switch on the modules you need, and give every parent, student and staff member a single place to log in.