Free Hostel Management for Vocational Schools

Three things make vocational hostels distinct, and the module is built around them. First, cohort-living: trainees in the same trade and intake usually room together so peer practice and study groups happen naturally, which means the allocation map filters by program and batch, not just by year-group. Second, sponsorship layering: a typical vocational trainee's room and board is paid partly by the trainee, partly by a government subsidy (NSDC, Perkins V, Politeknik bidikmisi), and sometimes partly by an employer sponsor under an apprenticeship — the billing engine handles all three streams against one trainee record. Third, accreditation reporting: vocational regulators (AICTE, NBA, NBTE, AVETMISS, ACCSC) demand occupancy and capacity-utilisation reports in specific formats that K-12 and college hostel systems don't produce. Standard K-12 boarding software treats every boarder as a family-paid student in a single-cohort house; that breaks the first time NSDC asks for a per-trainee per-day mess cost, and the workaround is usually a spreadsheet.

Yes — that's a core use case. NSDC PMKVY residential reporting (per-trainee stipend disbursement, mess cost per day, attendance log) exports as the CSV/PDF format NSDC's project management unit accepts. Perkins V residential CTE provisions require itemised cost-per-student and federal/state share breakdown — the module's subsidy tracker produces both. AVETMISS (Australia's NCVER vocational data standard) residential fields are supported in the export pipeline. NBTE polytechnic standards (Nigeria) and Politeknik DIKTI reporting (Indonesia) work similarly. Honest caveat: each agency tweaks its template every couple of years, and there's a small mapping job at upgrade time if the template changes — the open-source community usually publishes a patch within weeks, but a school with no IT capacity may want a partner on retainer for that work.

Tag the trainee with a sponsor record (company name, sponsor contact, billing address, PO reference). At term-end the module generates one consolidated invoice per sponsor listing all their trainees and the residential charges incurred, instead of mailing 30 individual invoices. Common in India's NAPS apprenticeships (employer pays on-campus housing under the contract), Indonesia's SMK industri partnerships, German-style dual-system, US registered apprenticeships, and Philippine TESDA dual-training. Sponsor-payment reconciliation flags any company that's behind on the term, and you can hold or release trainee records for the next term based on payment status.

Yes. AICTE Approval Process Handbook prescribes hostel capacity norms (separate boys' and girls' blocks, minimum area per trainee, warden-to-trainee supervision ratio, mandatory fire NOC and structural stability certificate) and inspection visits ask for occupancy-utilisation tables and gender-split rosters. The module exports those tables in the format AICTE inspectors use, and the same data feeds NBA accreditation residential criteria. Equivalent exports exist for NBTE (Nigeria) polytechnic standards, ACCSC (US) accreditation, and CIS for international vocational schools. The honest line: the software produces the records; the inspector still wants to see the physical blocks, the fire-safety equipment, and the trained warden. The module makes the documentation side defensible — it doesn't replace the physical compliance.

Yes, indirectly. Vocational programs run on-campus terms interleaved with off-site industrial training (OJT in Philippines, NAPS apprenticeship blocks in India, magang in Indonesia, work-based learning blocks under Perkins V). The hostel module exposes a 'residency status' field per trainee per date range — when a trainee is on a 6-week industrial placement and physically away from the dorm, the bed is flagged as 'temporarily vacated, held for return' rather than 'available for reallocation'. Mess billing pauses automatically for that date range. The rotation schedule itself lives in the academic module (course schedule, batch calendar), and the hostel module reads residency status from it — so you set up the rotation once and both systems stay in sync.

License fee: $0 (LGPLv3 open-source). VPS hosting: $10-30/month for a 200-bed hostel on Hetzner CX22, DigitalOcean basic droplet, or Linode Nanode — call it $200-360/year. Domain: ~$15/year. Optional managed backups: $5-10/month, so ~$120/year. IT labour: roughly one IT-staff afternoon per quarter for OS patches and version upgrades, which is usually absorbed by whoever already maintains the campus Moodle or library catalog. All in, a 200-bed vocational hostel runs the stack for under $500/year in direct costs. Compare that to proprietary polytechnic hostel software (per-bed annual licensing typically $8-25 per bed per year in India, higher in US Perkins V-funded schools), which puts a 200-bed campus at $1,600-5,000/year just for the licence — before implementation and support. The honest trade-off: you swap the licence fee for self-hosting responsibility and the loss of vendor-managed support; schools with any in-house IT capacity (or a local Odoo partner on retainer) save five figures over five years, schools with no IT capacity at all often prefer to pay the proprietary licence.