Web Based Institutional Management System for Institute for Accounting Studies (IAS)

Abstract

IAS is one of the leading institutes in the field of conducting classes for professional examinations in accountancy stream. Their main focus is placed on all the levels of the examinations conducted by the institutes of AAT, CASL, CMA and IBSL. They have a large student base in every year, due to the reputation obtained through conducting lectures on professional examinations in all three media Sinhala, English and Tamil since 1975. Their head office is located at Kirulapone (Colombo 06). Currently all the student records are manually maintained and basically urgent communication and notifications are done over the phone. The proposed web based institutional management system will mainly address on above mentioned aspects in a highly cost effective and efficient manner and enable search student records and find information with less time. The proposed institutional management system will also address the discrepancies in finding and distributing tutorials by providing an on-line solution to upload tutorials for lecturers in their home itself. Also, students will be benefited by having the ability to download tutorials and assignments and answer papers through online which will increase the productivity. This proposed system will also enhance the efficiency and accuracy in decision making and in the day to day activities of the institute, by providing report generation facilities to the staff and the management. When concerning the software development life cycle, Rational Unified Process (RUP) development methodology was used throughout the process because of the benefits can be achieved as mentioned in the design chapter. Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, NetBeans IDE 7.2, MySQL Workbench 5.2 and XAMPP version 1.8.0 were used as the tools for the system development. XAMPP is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package consisting of Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP. The system was implemented using CodeIgniter PHP framework version 2.1.4 according to the Object Oriented Design concepts. PHP version 5.4.4 was used in XAMPP as the server side scripting language and development was done on Windows platform. jQuery JavaScript library was used as client side scripting language.HTML5 was used as the mark-up language and CSS3 was used for styling in the system implementation.