A complete management system for private hostels and paying-guest accommodations. It handles the room register, the monthly fees, the mess, the front gate and the daily flow of complaints and notices - and it can be handed to any hostel brand under their own name and colours.

The problem

Most hostels run on a mix of registers, WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. Nobody can answer simple questions quickly: which beds are free this week, who has not paid for March, who ate in the mess yesterday, or whether a student came back before the night curfew. Parents, who are usually the ones paying, have no visibility at all.

What we built

Six different people use the same system, and each one sees only what they need:

• Super admin - the hostel group owner, across all branches.
• Branch admin - runs one hostel: admissions, rooms, fees, staff.
• Warden - day-to-day discipline, gate movements, complaints.
• Mess handler - menus, meal scans and grocery stock.
• Student - own fees, mess menu, complaints, notices and events.
• Parent - the child's attendance, fee status and notices.

The modules behind those screens include:

• Rooms and beds - a live picture of every bed, so an enquiry can be answered on the spot.
• Monthly fees - the annual fee is split into months, and a payment is applied to the oldest unpaid month first, so dues never become guesswork.
• Two separate attendances - mess attendance from meal scans, and premises attendance from the gate register. They are deliberately never mixed, because a student who skips dinner has not left the building.
• QR identity - every student carries a signed QR code that the mess and gate scanners verify, so a screenshot of someone else's code will not pass.
• Mess and groceries - weekly menu, meal counts and stock consumption.
• Complaints, notices, events, chat and exams - the everyday communication that otherwise lives in a WhatsApp group.
• Platform console - a separate console to onboard a new hostel group, add branches and set their logo, name and colours.

How it helps

• The owner sees occupancy and collection for every branch on one dashboard.
• Parents can check attendance and fees themselves, which cuts down the phone calls.
• Money is stored in whole paise and allocated by a fixed rule, so two people never disagree about a balance.
• Every hostel group's data is isolated by tenant and branch on every single query.

Technology

A Next.js web application for the six roles, a second Next.js console for platform staff, and an Express and MySQL API with hand-written queries and no ORM. Times are stored in universal time and shown in Indian time; the web app is built to be wrapped later as an Android and iOS app.