St. Albert's Academy is an invented company. We built this to show how the thing works, not for a customer, so there are no business figures anywhere on this page.
The situation
What this kind of business is dealing with
Common in the trade, not a description of anybody in particular. If two or three of these sound like your week, the build below is the shape of the answer.
- Attendance is taken on paper and typed up later, if there is time.
- Parents ring the office to ask about something the school already sent out.
- Chasing fees is somebody's whole afternoon, every week.
- Notices go out on a group chat nobody can leave and nobody can search.
- Reports take a week of staff evenings every term.
What we built
The pieces of it
Each of these exists and runs. Ask for a walkthrough of any one of them.
- Registers taken in the room
- A teacher marks the register on a phone or tablet in a few seconds. If it takes longer than that it does not get used, so that is the bar we built to.
- Fees, invoices and reminders
- Invoices raised per pupil, payment plans tracked, and reminders sent on a schedule -- so the awkward phone call is the last step rather than the first.
- One timetable everyone reads from
- Classes, rooms and staff on a single timetable. When the office changes it, teachers and parents see the change rather than hearing about it.
- Reports assembled through the term
- Marks and comments entered as they happen, gathered into a report at the end instead of rebuilt from scratch in the last week.
- A parent app for iOS and Android
- Attendance, timetable, reports, fees, permission slips and notices, from one codebase to both app stores.
- Notices sent once
- One message to a class, a year group or the whole school, delivered as a push notification and still readable in the app a month later.
- Roles for office, teachers and parents
- Each person sees their own children, their own classes, or the whole school, depending on the job they do.
How it works
What actually happens, in order
- 01
The office sets up the year: pupils, classes, staff and the timetable.
- 02
Teachers take the register in class on a phone or tablet.
- 03
An absence nobody has explained sends a notification to that pupil's parents the same morning.
- 04
Parents open the app for attendance, timetable and notices, and answer a permission slip with a tap.
- 05
The office raises fee invoices in a batch, and reminders go out on their own until an invoice is paid.
- 06
Teachers enter marks through the term, and the report builds itself from what is there.
- 07
At the end of term the office publishes reports, and parents get them in the app rather than in a bag.
The build
Facts about the thing itself
Size, scope and how long it took. These describe the build. They are not customer figures, because there is no customer and a number we did not measure would be worth nothing to you.
- Modules
- 7
- Build time
- 6 weeks
Built with
- Next.js
- React Native
- Expo
- PostgreSQL
- Push notifications