CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION
The essence of obtaining an education is for better adaptation in society, and to be able to make

an impact therein. The desire to acquire knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind and every

human whose mind is not depraved will be willing to give all that is required of him/her to get

knowledge.

According to Oxford Dictionary of Current (6 th Edition), fee is defined as an amount of money

that one pays for professional services. Simply put, school fee is that fixed interval payment

made by a student or students to the school he or she attends.

From the definition, one can outline that school fee payment supposed to be in a regular interval

that is timely, although sometime may not be that ready by the student due to some financial

lapses.

Financial lapses pose a lot of problems to school management because of some pressing needs.

However, when students refuse to pay their school fees on time the school management seems to

lack money in the purse which at this render the management ineffective.

Apart from the management being ineffective financially, students also face barriers by not being

allowed to write their examinations which is one of the academic frustration or setbacks.

Using computer – based system for fees payment necessitated this project in order to help solve

this problems of either delayed fee payment, or the student not paying at all or the fee being

misused/mismanaged or entangled with criminal attack either on the side of student at the course

of payment or the side of bursary department/school management.

Using Oduduwa University Ipetumodu as a case study, the project has the intention of creating a

website that could process students school fees payment to Oduduwa University Ipetumodu bank

accounts and electronically lodging individual students’ fees indicating their department,

matriculation number, level, date of payment, amount of money paid, academic personal records

etc. This will enhance prompt payment, safe delivery and automatically stop the management

and students from being frustrated financially and otherwise. Therefore, this project provides an

alternative method that enables secure online fees payment by students and/or their sponsors.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Fees payments by students in Oduduwa University Ipetumodu (OUI) are made through cash

deposits, Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) and Bank drafts to the school’s accounts in specific

bank branches. This project provides an alternative method that enables secure online fees

payment by students and their sponsors. OUI has a large number of students who are supposed to

pay all the school fees through cash deposits or bank drafts to the school’s accounts in specific

bank branches. This method of paying fees has not been efficient enough especially during

periods of tests and examinations when most of the students are paying fees to meet the

requirements for entering examination halls. The process of fees payment in such periods is

characterized by long queues, too much waiting by students and congestion at banks where

payments are made. Students queue to pay fees and those who do not reach counters within the

banks' working hours are advised to return the next day.

This process has always resulted in students missing to sit for their tests and/or examinations

while they are queuing to make payments. It has also resulted to too much costs and a lot of time
used in transferring and withdrawing money whenever sponsors of students make money

transfers to students who can pay school fees at specific bank branches. It is upon this

background that I suggested an alternative method which enables secure online fees payment by

students and their sponsors.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The problems encountered with the manual method of school fees payment in Oduduwa

university is viewed from two perspectives, the school managements’ problems and the students’

problem. The school management must manually tally and update each transaction, leading to

delays in updating fee balances and generating receipts. This approach is not only time-

consuming but also prone to errors.

The available modes of fees payment in Oduduwa University Ipetumodu involving cash

deposits, Electronic Funds Transfers (EFT) and bank drafts usually cause long queues in bank

making students unable to sit for their examinations at the scheduled time.

Today, the computer has made almost everything easy, this, as a result, will help in many things,

students have been encountering the problems of getting receipt having to pay their school fees.

They cluster at the bursary unit where tellers of payment are being confirmed manually. This has

caused a lot of problems among the students, for instance, the strong will always push aside the

weaker ones in order to get their tellers confirmed fast.

Though, some improvements (Avvari, M, 2011, Sekibira R, 2013 e.t.c) have been made in that

direction, there is still need for improvement. Hence this study.

AIM AND OJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

The aim of this project is to design and implement a cashless school fee payment system.

The objectives of this project are to;

i. enumerate and analyze the parameters relevant to students’ school fees payment;

ii. design a system to manage the parameters in (i);

iii. implement the system in (ii) and;

iv. evaluate the system in (iii).

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The study was carried out for Oduduwa University Ipetumodu and was intended to offer an extra

channel for school fees payment, through the development of a secure online fees payment

system. The study focused on the development of a web-based system that allows secure online

school fees payment for Oduduwa University Ipetumodu. The system will be used by students

and their sponsors to pay the university’s school fees online, and by the university’s account

offices to verify student’s payments. The system captures both the student’s details and the

financial information after payments are made.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

Literature asserts that, for nearly every business, the simple act of collecting payments from

consumers is actually quite complex and yet organizations want to make it easy and convenient

for customers to pay, so they offer multiple choices of payment types and channels (Plymouth

and Martin, 2009).

Therefore, this project proposed the development of an alternative platform that enables students

and their sponsors securely pay school fees online from wherever they are using a voucher. This

will reduce the lengthy queues and congestion at banks for payments. Furthermore, this project

will also help to reduce the number of students that currently miss lectures, sitting for their tests

and examinations while waiting to reach bank counters to make payments.

LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

Some of the major constraints of this work include;

1. Finance: Finance is constraint experienced while carrying out this research. The

inadequate of finance to carry out this research slowed down this research work. Despite

the limitations, every effort was geared towards accomplishing this project.

2. Power supply: Non-availability of stable, efficient and reliable power supply is a

limitation of this project as it is dependent on electricity.

3. Resources: The cost of hardware, software, site design, online distribution cost, and

maintenance of the site; all these are factored into the cost of providing the product.

DEFINITION OF TERMS
1. Computer Network: Computer Network is a system that connects two or more

computers together using a communication link.

2. Database: This refers to a large store of related data on a computer that can be accessed

and modified by the user.

3. Databases: A systematically arranged collection of computer data, structured so that it

can be automatically retrieved or manipulated. It is also called databank.

4. E-Transact: Electronic Transaction is a multi-application, multi-network and multi-

channel electronic payment platform that supports all major networks such as

MasterCard. It is the first online real-time payment solution that allows account holders

to pay for services in the Educational sectors.

5. File Transfer: Any kind of computer file can be sent via the Internet from one Internet

user to another.

6. Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks are highlighted words and phrase you find on web documents

that you can click on as to jump to some other documents or Internet services.

7. Offline: Disconnected from computer network; describes a computer terminal or

peripheral device disconnected from a computer network.

8. Password: This is a secret code that a user must type into a computer to enable him to to

access it or its applications. This is composed of numbers, letter, special character or a

combination of any of the above categories.

9. Record: Is a document made or received in the course of a practical activity as an

instrument or a by-product of such activity, and set aside for action or reference.

10. Receipt: A piece of written note that attests to a payment made to one another carrying

the amount paid and balance if incurred, usually signed by both party or one end.
11. System: Set of computer components that is, an assembling of hardware, software and

peripherals functioning together.

12. Web Brower: This is a special kind of software that processes hypertext make-up

language (HTML) document. In other words, a web browser is a computer program that

interprets HTML command to collect, arranged and display the parts of a webpage.

13. Website: A website is a collection of many interconnected web pages organized by a

specific college, organization company etc., containing web pages (good and

commodities) on the Internet. Websites are stored on web servers. There are many

websites and thousands of HTML pages on each website. A website is a treasure of

information and entertainment.

14. World Wide Web: World Wide Web simply called www is the most important tool of

the Internet.