My experiences with the billing module are quite good so far.
I’m working with a school who wishes to go further than just monitoring fee payments. The wish is to include stock items as well e.g. text books. I don’t see any major problem doing so except that there is no stock management system included.
I’m quite sure that stock management and monitoring is an issue for every school, right?
Do you have something in this regard or maybe ideas how to go about it? How does your school deal with this issue?
Roman, the Library module (under Learn) is actually a flexible asset management system that can be used for just this purpose. We use it to run all of our school’s ICT and AV inventory and loans, for example. Let us know if this helps. Thanks : ) Ross
I had a closer look at the library module. I’m not sure if this is really what I’m looking for right now. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough?
The school I’m working with purchases various items especially before the start of the academic year consisting of items that the students/guardians need, e.g. text books, calculators, school uniforms, etc. Therefore aside from fee payments we have item payments as well and that’s where the issue of stock management and monitoring comes in. The stock management system should track "ins” and "outs” and inform administration about current quantities, orders, reorder needs, etc.
Things are not really clear to me yet. I guess I just need something to get started with.
Sounds like you may need a full-fledged point of sale or inventory management system, some google searches turn up a few open source options that may work. Perhaps it’s worth testing a few out and seeing if they fit your needs?
Gibbon’s billing module is fully integrated, which has obviously many advantages, e.g. having access to student enrolment information, etc.
The POS-side is somehow covered with Gibbon’s billing module. However, “inventory management” is apparently not.
To integrate an “inventory management system” into Gibbon sounds like the right approach here. Sharing data with the billing and user modules would make things easier. However, it may be an awful lot of work with rather few interested people.
Your idea to use an independent “inventory management system” may be better here. However, it should use a similar technology, e.g. web-based, mysql, php, etc. I’m not looking for something „full-fledged“ but rather light, easy, tweakable, etc.
Did you come across something interesting in your research?
Doing well, busy as always I didn’t do all that much research, just a couple quick google searches, but they turned up a fair number of options so if you narrow your parameters to PHP/MySQL I’m sure you’d still find some to choose between.
At the end of the day I don’t think Gibbon could ever replace every piece of software a school needs (as lovely as that might be ). Depending on the system and complexity, you may be able to do some Query Builder exports to get the info you need out of Gibbon into another system via csv. Or if you find you need to import into Gibbon the data admin module can setup custom import types, happy to lend a hand if that’s the route you go.
Give a shout if you find something that may work, always keen to see what other integrations are possible.
Roman, I can see your point here, but Sandra is right that there is a point where Gibbon might not be able to do something that is useful for a school, even though it would be useful, just because the scope is outside of our current focus, which is determined by the resources we have available to us.
This is not to say your particular idea will never happen, as it is a good idea…but it is off of our official roadmap for now. Hope this makes sense.
I didn’t do all that much research, just a couple quick google searches, but they turned up a fair number of options so if you narrow your parameters to PHP/MySQL I’m sure you’d still find some to choose between.
). Depending on the system and complexity, you may be able to do some Query Builder exports to get the info you need out of Gibbon into another system via csv. Or if you find you need to import into Gibbon the data admin module can setup custom import types, happy to lend a hand if that’s the route you go.