ERPNext helps schools and colleges to build an integrated enterprise system at a very low cost. It provides out-of-box functionality for managing entire student life cycle and administrative processes like accounting, purchase, inventory management, and HRMS. It enables the institutes to effectively manage administrative processes and allow the faculty to focus on what is most important for the institute, to educate!
Following are the key modules of ERPNext for academic institutes:
- Student Information module helps maintain student details like personal information, date of birth, address etc. It also records the guardian and sibling details. The email id added in the guardian detail can be linked to an email group for sending newsletters or announcements. When a student is enrolled for a program, the student batch is selected to enroll the student for the given program and batch. A student batch-wise attendance report can be used to view the number of students present from the batch. A Student Group is created for every course for academic term and academic year.
- Admissions module allows creation of all records starting from student application till the program enrollment. A student applicant record needs to be created when a student applies for a program at the institute. One can approve or reject a student applicant. By accepting a student applicant one can add them to the student master. If an institution has skipped the online admission process then program enrollment can also be considered as the confirmation of the admission in a particular program. Using this module, the institute can conduct online admissions!
- Student Attendance module allows to track and manage attendance of a student in all the days at any time. It is designed to help teachers easily mark student attendance during class. Alternatively, the student attendance tool can be used to bulk update the attendance for students based on student group and course schedule. ERPNext allows to record the leave application for a student. In case the student is not attending the institute in order to participate or represent institute in any event, he/she can be marked as present from the Leave Application itself. Once a Leave Application is recorded for a student it will not be recorded in the absent student report as she has applied for a leave.
- Course Schedule module helps maintain the schedule of a session conducted by an Instructor for a particular course. One can see the overall course schedule in the calendar view.
- Assessment module can be used to manage complete assessment processing. Based on the performance of student in the assessment, one can create assessment result for a student. Assessment results can be created in bulk using assessment result tool. In this tool, on selection of assessment plan, all the students (for student group) will be fetched. One can quickly enter marks earned by each student for each assessment criteria in a single row.
- Fees Collection module helps maintain a record of fees collected from students. The fee structure is fetched based on the selected program and academic term. The institute can set the “Income Account” and “Receivable Account” in the Accounts section which refers to an Account of the Chart of Accounts. The institute can also mention the Cost Center in which its income will be booked.
- Financial Accounting module includes functionality for maintaining chart of accounts, provision to make journal entries, handling purchase invoices, and managing cost centers. It provides key financial reports viz. Balance Sheet, Income & Expenses Statement and Cash Flow Statement.
- Inventory Management module helps keep track of items with three main types of entries: Purchase Receipt (Items received from Suppliers against Purchase Orders), Stock Entry (Items transferred from one store to another) and Delivery Note (Items shipped outside the institute).
- Purchase module provides functionality to maintain supplier database. It supports the purchase process starting from purchase request to Request for Quotation (RFQ) to quotation to purchase order to purchase receipt to purchase invoice. As ERPNext is GST compliant , handling taxation is very easy.
- Human Resources (HR) module covers the processes linked to managing a team of co-workers. Most important feature here is processing the payroll by using Payroll Entry to generate Salary Slips. There are a set of rules for the institute to deduct taxes and social security from employee payroll. ERPNext allows accommodating all types of taxes and their calculation. It also maintains a complete employee database including contact information, salary details, attendance, performance evaluation, and appraisal records. Other supported functionality includes leave & attendance, loan management, training, recruitment, and travel & expense claims.
Thus, ERPNext provides almost all functionality needed by any school or college. If any additional functionality is needed or the existing functionality needs to be modified then the technical consultants can be involved to make changes in the code.
