Education

A school office handles fees, receipts, attendance and report cards, often across separate books, spreadsheets and phone calls. When a parent asks what they still owe, someone has to check several places before answering, and the same records get typed more than once. Teachers and parents need some of the same information, but each needs a different view of it and different permissions.

Families have problems of their own. BECE candidates choosing senior high schools must follow GES rules on school categories, programmes and the sixth choice, and a list on paper will not tell them when a combination breaks one. The rules can also change from one year to the next.

Students preparing for exams may use a laptop, a phone app and WhatsApp in the same week. If each channel keeps its own account, their work is split across them. On mobile data, a slow page or a long wait for a reply is often enough to make a student give up.

Most of the work is getting one set of records to serve everyone who needs it. SwiftSchool, a product we built from one school's needs and now run for 12 schools, keeps fees, invoices and receipts next to student records. Parents can pay by mobile money, and administrators, teachers and parents each have their own dashboard in the Android and iOS apps. SMS keeps parents informed without a trip to the school.

Where rules change, we keep them out of the code. SHSSelect checks each school choice against the GES guidelines while a student builds the list, and when the guidelines change, the rules are updated without rewriting the application.

GhLearner, which we built for a client, gives learners one account across a website, mobile apps and a WhatsApp bot. Slow work runs in the background so the bot can reply quickly.

The services that apply are education technology, custom software, mobile apps, mobile money payments, and SMS and WhatsApp automation.