Coaching Institute Portal

Admission season filled the institute’s office with queues. Kota draws students from across India to prepare for JEE and NEET, and every new session brought a rush of forms on paper, fees in cash, demand drafts and cheques, and receipt books checked by hand.

Once classes began, batch timetables changed often and reached students only through notices in class. Test results from the weekly OMR tests were pinned to a board, and parents in other states phoned the office to ask how their child had done. Fee instalments were chased one phone call at a time.

We spent the busiest weeks at the admissions desk and in the accounts office before designing anything.

• Most of the queue was waiting to pay, not to ask questions.
• Parents were far away. Many students had moved to Kota alone, and their parents had no direct view of fees, attendance or results.
• Timetables changed weekly, and students who missed a notice missed a class.
• Results took days to reach parents, even though the OMR machine had them within hours.

Students apply online: they choose a course and a batch, upload their documents and photograph, and register for the scholarship test if they want to. Seat limits for each batch are enforced as admissions come in, so a full batch closes automatically.

The admissions team reviews each application in the portal, confirms the batch, and sends the fee plan to the student and parent in one step.

Each course has fee plans: the full fee, or instalments on set dates, with scholarship discounts applied automatically from the scholarship test result.

Students and parents pay online by card or net banking through CCAvenue, and the accounts team records cash, cheques and demand drafts in the same system. Every payment produces a numbered receipt straight away, by email and in the app. SMS reminders go out before each instalment is due, and the accounts team sees who has paid, who is due and who is overdue, without a single register.

Batches, faculty and rooms are planned together. The portal flags clashes before a timetable is published: a teacher in two places at once, or a room booked twice. When a class moves, every student in that batch is told on the app at once, and the change appears in their timetable.

Weekly tests stayed on OMR sheets, as students were used to. After each test, the OMR machine’s results file is imported into the portal, and every student sees their marks, batch rank and subject-wise performance the same day. Parents get an SMS with the result.

For the JEE Main computer-based exam, the portal also runs online mock tests in the same format: a timer, a question palette, and marking for review. Students practise the real exam experience before the day.

The Android app gives every student their timetable, notices, study material, fee dues and test results, with a progress chart across the session. Parents have their own login to see fees, results and notices for their child, wherever in India they are.

The portal runs on Laravel and MySQL, with an AngularJS front end on Bootstrap for the admissions and accounts teams. The student and parent app is native Android, built in Java. CCAvenue handles online payments, an SMS gateway sends reminders and results, and everything is hosted on AWS.

The portal went live for the new academic session. One batch used it first while the admissions team trained on the busiest screens, so the rush ran online from the first day.

We supported the institute in the years after, adding new courses and test series each term. When GST replaced service tax in July 2017, fee receipts and reports were switched over without disrupting a single payment.

Admission season now runs online, without queues at the office. Fees and instalments are collected and recorded on time, timetable changes reach every student at once, and test results arrive on phones the day they are marked. Parents in other states follow their child’s progress without calling.