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 bills
- Boarded students₦25.00 per boarder/day · billed daily
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 eleven surfaces for the boarding team — an overview, the directory, residents, maintenance, room inspections, house stock, safety, finance, a clearance register, analytics and the settings behind all of it — with a “My Hostel” area for the boarder, and the child’s house and open leave passes on the ward page for parents. Two of those are drill-downs rather than flat lists: the directory nests as the building does (house, then its rooms, then their beds), and safety is four registers because at nine at night the nightly count, a leave pass, a visitor at the gate and an incident are four different jobs. 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.
Nothing leaves with a bed still on it
Boarding holds its own line in the school’s exit clearance: a resident still in a bed, still owing a fee, or still holding house property is visible before anybody signs a leaver out — and the warden signs that line off themselves.
No switch to forget
Subscribing to the module is what turns boarding on. There is no separate “boarding enabled” flag to leave off and then wonder why a house full of allocated beds reports itself disabled.
How Hostel Management actually works
The screens below are the real application, running live on this page with sample school data — not screenshots. Each one is the same screen your team would use.
Boarding team & house staff
The boarding team runs the module. These screens are the job: know the state of the houses, place the boarders, maintain the physical map right down to the bed, keep everyone safe overnight, fix what breaks, inspect what is standing, collect what is owed, and know who is still holding a bed they should have given back.
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, and it is navigated the way the building is: a list of houses, and you walk into one. Everything else in the module points at it, which is why it is worth getting right once.
Walk into a house
Opening a house lists its rooms, and opening a room lists its beds. Three rungs, three pages — and the figures above each table describe that rung alone.
Keep the house safe overnight
Safety is the duty-of-care record, in four registers across one tab strip: incidents, visitors, leave passes and the nightly count. They were one stacked page until 2026-08-29 — which meant none of them could be linked to, and the urgent one sat below a list of unbounded length.
Take the nightly count
Roll call is taken against the bed list rather than against a piece of paper, which is what makes it a safeguarding record instead of a headcount.
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.
Inspect what is standing
Room inspections are their own register rather than a tab under repairs: a repair is something that broke, an inspection is the routine that finds it before it does.
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.
Know who has not given the bed back
Clearance is the boarding module’s answer to “what is still out with us” — the live list, not a queue that only exists once somebody raises a departure.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Boarding team & house staff” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
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.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “Boarders” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
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.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “Parents & guardians” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Wardens & house staff
The person who does roll-call at ten at night is not the person who owns the module. There is no separate warden app: Rita signs in as herself, and because her role grants Hostel Management, the same school-portal pages appear in her sidebar — scoped to this module and nothing else. That is the whole of the staff-facing story, and it is deliberately short.
Her house, in her own sidebar
The same resident screen the boarding office uses, reached by a member of staff whose role grants the module. No shared office login, no printed house list going out of date the moment a boarder moves room.
Log the incident while it is fresh
Visitor logs, security incidents and inspections are house-staff work by definition — they happen in the house, at night, in front of the warden. Recording them where they happen is why the safety history is accurate rather than reconstructed the next morning.
Report the fault, close the job
A broken shower is noticed by the person on duty. Raising it here puts it in the same queue the estates team reads, rather than in a note left on the office door.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Wardens & house staff” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
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 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. If they still hold a bed, owe a boarding fee or have house property out, boarding’s clearance line holds their exit open until the warden signs it off.
Is there a setting that turns boarding on?+
No — subscribing to Hostel Management is the switch. There used to be a `boarding enabled` flag in the module’s settings that nothing actually read, whose only effect was to badge the overview “Boarding disabled” for schools that had already built their houses and allocated their beds. It was dropped on 2026-08-29.
Why is the directory three pages instead of three tabs?+
Because the figures above a table have to describe the rows in it. With tabs, one stat row sat over a table that might be showing houses, rooms or beds, and a bed could appear beside a hostel it was not in. Now a house lists its rooms and a room lists its beds, each with its own summary — and each is a URL somebody can link to.
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