University&EducationSystems

What a real student information system does

One student record, one identity, one source of truth, from application to alumni.

### Admissions and enrolment Application intake, document upload and verification, eligibility screening, offers and acceptances, and enrolment that creates the student record rather than starting a new one. Where a national admissions process feeds you students, the SIS ingests that list instead of retyping it.

### Registration Course catalogue and programme structures, prerequisites enforced automatically, section capacity and waitlists, timetable and clash detection, add/drop windows with an audit trail, and academic-advisor approval built into the flow.

### Grades and academic records Grade entry by instructor with a submission deadline and a lock, moderation and grade-change workflow with a reason and an approver, GPA calculation to your own institution's rules, progression and probation rules applied automatically, resit and retake handling.

### Transcripts and documents Official transcripts generated, not assembled — in Kurdish, Arabic or English, correctly typeset in RTL, with a verification code so an employer or a foreign university can check authenticity without phoning your registrar. Enrolment letters, graduation certificates and degree documents from the same record.

### Fees and finance Fee structures per programme and per cohort, instalment plans, scholarships, discounts and waivers, receipts, outstanding-balance visibility for the student, and a hold that blocks registration when it should. Online payment via the wallets and banks students actually use, with dual-currency handling where fees are set in USD.

### Portals

• Student: timetable, grades, transcript, fees, documents, one login
• Instructor: class lists, grade entry, attendance, advisees
• Registrar and admin: the full record, with a real permission model
• Parent (schools): attendance, grades, fee status, announcements

### Moodle integration — not Moodle replacement Your Moodle stays. The SIS becomes the system of record and pushes to it: courses and sections created automatically each term, enrolments synced so nobody manually adds students to a course, and grades pulled back to the official record instead of being re-keyed. Single sign-on so a student has one password.

This is the highest-value first project for most institutions, because it removes the largest source of manual work without asking anyone to change how they teach.

Also built for

Private schools — enrolment, attendance, grades, report cards, parent portal, fee collection and reminders.

Institutes and training centres — cohort intake, course scheduling, attendance, certification and certificate verification.

Language centres and continuing education — placement testing, level progression, short-course billing.

Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic and English — all four, properly

Academic documents are the hardest thing in the world to get right in Kurdish and Arabic, because a transcript is a dense table and right-to-left table layout is where most systems break. Names, numerals, mixed-direction text inside a single cell, and correct rendering in a generated PDF — these are solved in the build, not patched afterwards.

And Kurdish here means two languages, not one. A university in Duhok or Zakho works in Bahdini. A university in Hawler or Sulaymaniyah works in Sorani. Most systems ship one and label it "Kurdish", which leaves half the region's institutions reading a dialect that is not theirs — on their own official documents.

What that means concretely:

• Every interface string exists separately in Bahdini and in Sorani
• A student's official transcript prints in the dialect their institution uses, correctly typeset, not transliterated or approximated
• A student's name is stored once and renders correctly across all four languages without corruption — which matters enormously when that name appears on a degree certificate
• Each user chooses their own language: an instructor can work in Bahdini while an international admissions officer works in English, from the same record
• An institution running campuses in more than one city can set the dialect per campus

If a vendor cannot tell you which Kurdish their system is in, it is Sorani, and you should ask them what that means for your Duhok campus.

AI for institutions, used carefully

I build AI automation and AI assistants alongside the systems, and education is a place where AI helps enormously in some spots and is actively dangerous in others. Both halves matter.

Where it works well:

• Admissions document processing — reading and verifying uploaded certificates and transcripts at intake, flagging what needs a human rather than making everyone check everything
• A student assistant that knows your rules — answering "am I eligible for this course", "when is add/drop", "what do I owe" from your actual regulations and the student's actual record, in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic or English, at 2am during registration week when your registrar's office is closed
• Early-warning flags — attendance and grade patterns that suggest a student is drifting, surfaced to an advisor while it can still be fixed
• Timetable and clash resolution — proposing workable schedules against room, staff and prerequisite constraints
• Drafting the repetitive correspondence — enrolment letters, standard responses, announcements in all four languages

Where I will refuse:

• AI does not grade, and it does not decide admissions or progression. Those are consequential decisions about people's lives, they must be explainable and appealable, and a model's output is neither
• AI does not generate anything that appears on an official transcript or certificate
• Student records are not sent to a third-party model without an explicit, documented decision by the institution about what leaves your systems and what does not

That boundary is part of the AI consulting work: telling you clearly which AI projects to do, and which to refuse — even when a vendor is offering them.

Built to be handed over

Institutions outlive vendors. So:

• Your data is yours — full export, documented schema, no hostage-taking
• Written technical documentation, not just a user manual
• Your IT staff get trained on the system, with the source
• Standard, widely-known technology — Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL — so any competent developer can pick it up if I am ever unavailable
• Role-based access control and an audit log on every record change, because academic records are legally consequential

Phasing

Nobody replaces a whole institution's systems in one go, and any vendor who proposes it is selling you a crisis.

1. Student record + Moodle sync — one identity, automated enrolment. Biggest relief, smallest risk. 2. Registration + timetabling — the term-start bottleneck 3. Grades + transcripts — the manual work disappears 4. Fees + payments — finance joins the record 5. Admissions — the front door, once the rest is stable

Each phase runs live before the next starts.

How pricing works

An institution's SIS is priced by scope, and the range between a private institute and a full public university is genuinely enormous — so a published figure would mislead one of you.

What drives it:

• Which phases you take, and how many at once. Phase one alone is a fraction of the whole
• Student and staff numbers, and how many campuses or faculties
• How your academic rules actually work — GPA calculation, progression, resits and grade moderation differ by institution, and these rules are the system
• Data migration — how many years of historical records have to come across, from how many disconnected systems, in what condition. On education projects this is usually the largest and most underestimated item
• Integrations — Moodle, payments, existing identity systems
• Whether documents are legally consequential — verifiable transcripts and degree certificates carry more validation, audit and testing work than internal reports

What keeps it down: starting with phase one only, exportable existing data, and one empowered person on your side who can answer academic-policy questions without a committee.

What you get: a free scoping call, then a written proposal with fixed scope and fixed price per phase. You commit one phase at a time, each goes live before the next begins, and you own everything delivered in a completed phase whether or not you continue.

For institutes, training centres and private schools, the scope — and therefore the cost — is considerably smaller than for a university. Ask.

Where to start

If you run a university, college, institute or private school here and you are not sure whether this is a six-week project or a two-year one, the fastest way to find out is a call. I will tell you which phase would actually help you and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire me.

Book a free 15-minute call →