The Housing Director allows you to manage all aspects of your operation in one piece of user-friendly software. A fairly inclusive listing of the features follows – broken down into the following categories: Student data, Facilities, Occupancy, Billing, Reports, Information Dissemination, and Miscellaneous.

Student Data

  • Maintain student personal information
  • Import one student from your campus-wide student information system (when a student shows up in your office asking for housing, and they are not already in the housing database)
  • View where a student lives today, along with their phone, po box, etc.
  • Track permanent, off-campus and secondary addresses for a student
  • Create unlimited user-defined fields for your students (these fields are importable and exportable)
  • Customizable student notes section for storing notes for each student
  • Date-based log entries can be tied to mail-merge letters and emails
  • Mass-editing of student data, including custom data fields (based on filtered query)
  • Set flags for students that are triggered by any filter criteria you specify
  • Set certain fields as Private for a student
  • Local phone, p.o. box and net port ID are taken from their room or bed assignment
  • Track student dining plan history and dining point/dollar transactions
  • Floor staff data linked to student data (if staff member is a student)
  • View photo of student
  • Track a student’s status (1st year, returning, transfer, etc.) and class status
  • Track key numbers, plus when and if the key was returned
  • Track major, GPA, credit hours accumulated, etc.
  • Store when housing application was received by time frame
  • Track the dependents of a student
  • Store all room requests, prioritized by the student

Occupancy

  • All hall/floor/room/bed/student custom fields are time-frame-based
  • Advanced waiting list management
  • Automatically (or manually) create room assignments – 7 ways to make an assignment, taking both student-based and room-based approaches
  • Automatically (or manually) assign roommates to each other (built into the AutoAssign process)
  • Track scheduled check-in date versus actual moved-in date
  • Track room assignments that students were assigned to but never occupied (otherwise known as “ghost assignments”)
  • AutoAssign first to an MS Excel spreadsheet for review
  • AutoAssign process matches students as roommates and students to rooms simultaneously for best results
  • Create assignments automatically for any filtered list of students
  • Create a filtered set of rooms, based on standard or custom attributes of halls/floors/rooms, to be used for AutoAssigning
  • Group rooms together into suites
  • Manage a web-based room selection process
  • Make concurrent time-frame based and monthly assignments
  • Track how many terms/semesters a student has lived on campus
  • Manage room vacancies
  • Assign to the bed level
  • Make beds inactive (this can help manage overflow housing)
  • Automatically determine whether a student is supposed to receive housing based on data imported from your campus-wide student information system, like if their housing deposit has been received
  • Track multiple room changes for each student, including a room change report for a given period of time – no need to repeatedly print full rosters!
  • Assign for an unlimited number of time frames (Winter Intersession 2012, Spring 2012, Summer 2012, etc.)
  • Manage a room lottery system via random number, accumulated credit hours, number of semesters in housing, GPA, or first-come-first-served priority
  • Quickly and easily switch rooms for a student or swap rooms for 2 students (one-step process even pro-rates their bills automatically!)
  • Quick cancel room process uses daily pro-ration or user-defined pro-ration tables
  • Verify roommate requests to make sure they match each other – and resolve any conflicts
  • The ‘Assign by Room Screen’ includes the names of currently assigned students for the selected room
  • Print room contracts automatically (or manually) as assignments are made

Facilities

  • Keep track of features of residence halls, floors, rooms, and beds – such as accessibility, private bath, special interest or any other special features you may have
  • Mass-editing of room data, including custom data fields (based on filtered query)
  • Prioritize and assign maintenance problems
  • Track room inventories, including damaged and missing items
  • Print work orders
  • Upon request, printing a work order automatically changes the status from ‘Open’ to ‘In Progress’
  • Track room conditions
  • Phone Number field can be associated with rooms or beds
  • Enter multiple basement floor levels for rooms that house students

Billing

  • Automatically bill students for your charges upon assignment (per your request)
  • Export billing charges/credits to your campus-wide financial system with the Data Interface Module and real-time interface
  • Pro-rate bills on a basis that YOU decide!
  • Set the first date for which charges for a time frame may be exported
  • Bill certain room types monthly, to accommodate faculty, etc.
  • Pro-rate dining plan fee when student switches dining plans
  • Mass editing of student billing information and assignments (You can also mass edit assignments without altering billing)
  • Bill for utilities
  • Manage payment plans
  • Automatically calculate and then notify students of damage billing for personal and common-area damage
  • Base room billing/fees on number of occupants in room if desired
  • Assign damage billing costs to any group of students, not just those in a specific hall, floor, or room
  • Generate billing credits

Reporting

  • Prepare customized reports (using a sophisticated query generator) to view on screen, to print or for export
  • Generate report with groupings, subtotals, grand totals, headers/footers, etc.
  • Query generator is extremely powerful without user needing to know any SQL
  • Built-in Vacancy Report on the “Room Assignments Overview” screen
  • Ability to export reports specifically for use in an external mail-merge document – like MS Word

Information Dissemination

  • Notify students via letter regarding roommate assignments, vandalism charges, and billing utilizing mail-merge features
  • Notify students selected in a query via letter or e-mail of anything – such as event notification, construction warnings and service lapses. (For example if Alexander Hall will lose water pressure from 1-2, you can e-mail all residents of that hall!)

Miscellaneous

  • Daily Summary screen includes current occupancy statistics by hall and overall, such as males and females in residence, open spots, and % occupied
  • Save records from one year to another in a historical file
  • Import and export to and from delimited text files, including those delimited by a TAB
  • Ability to import custom student data fields
  • Export reports to delimited text files or HTML files
  • Ability to export reports specifically for use in an external mail-merge document such as MS Word
  • Import each student’s photo file name
  • Print mailing labels and key envelope labels
  • Set user security privileges for various parts of the program (Full, Read Only, or Hide)
  • Set privacy fields per student
  • Create user groups
  • Passwords stored in the database using AES encryption
  • Customize grid layouts for each user
  • Customize which room fields will be displayed alongside the room number when selecting a room from a drop-down