Student housing management software runs the hostels of a college or university. It handles room applications, room allocation, roommate matching, hostel fees, check-in and check-out, and repair requests. It is also called hostel management software or residence management software.
A university with several thousand hostel beds has a large sorting problem every year. Thousands of students arrive in the same two weeks. Each one has preferences: a single or a shared room, an air-conditioned block, a vegetarian mess, a quiet floor. Rooms come at different prices. Boys' and girls' hostels are separate, and first-year students often live in separate blocks from seniors.
Say a university near Chennai has 3,600 hostel beds, and 4,100 students want one. The software reads the list of admitted students from the student information system (SIS). In May, it opens applications. Each student ranks three room types and answers a short questionnaire: their usual sleeping time, their food preference, and whether they study with music on. The software allocates rooms by the university's rules, for example first-year students first, and then students who live farthest from the campus. It then puts students whose answers are similar in the same room. Students who do not get a bed are placed on a waiting list, in order.
One first-year student is given a shared room without air-conditioning, at ₹72,000 a year including the mess. She pays the first instalment through the app. On arrival, she checks in at the hostel office, and the software records her room, her bed and her cupboard key. It also records the condition of the room, with photos, so that any damage found at check-out can be charged fairly.
Later, the ceiling fan in her room stops working. She reports it in the app, with a photo. The software turns her report into a work order, one repair job logged as a record. The work order goes to the university's computerised maintenance management system (CMMS), which assigns it to an electrician. When the electrician closes the job, she gets a message, and she can rate the repair.
Hostel software also records when students go out and come back, through gate passes. A student who wants to go home for a weekend applies in the app, and the warden approves the request. The software can send her parents a message when she leaves and when she returns.
Similar software runs private hostels outside the campus. Co-living and PG operators rent beds by the month to students and young professionals, with the same steps of booking, rent, check-in and repairs. On campus, students may pay their mess bills with a campus card.