DESCRIPTION
The project started at a private grammar school in Budapest, which operates as one of the country's most modern educational institutions. The grammar school has been working with a steadily increasing number of students for years, thus the management of tuition fees and various other payments has imposed an ever-growing administrative burden on the school. The finance department regularly processed hundreds of transactions manually, trying to match payments related to students from bank notifications, Excel spreadsheets, and email confirmations. The institution's management realised that to sustainably operate the growth, it is essential to develop a system that manages the entire payment process automatically, without errors, and transparently. By involving DetSystems, we developed an AI and automation solution that transformed the financial operations of the grammar school, eliminated manual burdens, and allowed the team to focus their time on much more valuable tasks.
PROBLEM
The biggest challenge for the high school was that payments arrived in huge quantities on a monthly basis, and each time they had to be manually identified and linked to the appropriate student, class, or programme. Parents' bank transfers often came with varying names, reference numbers were missing, or it was unclear which student the amount belonged to. The finance department often spent days organising, reconciling, recording and communicating with parents when any of the items could not be identified. This manual process was not only time-consuming but also carried the risk of errors and caused continuous stress for the administration team.
For the rapidly expanding institution, this became an increasingly significant problem: due to the growing number of students and the variety of special services, the handling of payments grew exponentially while the number of financial staff did not change. It became evident to the management that if the process did not become automated, the school would not be able to manage its financial administration sustainably, and the risk of errors could also increase. A solution was needed that could take over the entire administration: from receiving bank transactions to identification, recording, and feedback.
SOLUTION
DetSystems has built an integrated automation system that digitalised and automated the entire payment process of the secondary school. During the development, we connected the banking systems, the internal administration platform, and the school records, so that financial data began to flow to the appropriate places in real-time, without human intervention. The system is capable of automatically recognising the information related to the transfers, identifying the parent or the student, comparing them with the expected payments, and carrying out all necessary administrative steps in the background. The solution not only handles tuition fees but also all other payments that arise during the operation of the school.
During the development, it was important that the system did not operate solely based on simple rules but also learned from the data. The AI-based enhancement allows the program to recognise the different naming patterns of parents and to correctly match the transfer even if incomplete or inaccurate information is received. A transparent interface has been created for the finance team, where all data is displayed automatically, and they only need to deal with cases that require some special handling. The system has not only accelerated internal administration but has also made the payment process more predictable for parents, as all confirmations are automated and occur without delay.
RESULT
The introduction of the automated payment system has brought a real quality leap in the operation of the grammar school. The administrative burden on the finance department has virtually disappeared, as the system manages manual reconciliations, data entry, most of the accounting steps, and confirmations. The processing of transfers has been reduced to a few minutes, while the monthly reconciliations that previously took several days now happen automatically in real-time. The error rate has decreased significantly, operational processes have become more transparent, and the management has access to more accurate and up-to-date information regarding financial performance.
However, the greatest achievement is that the school's financial processes have become scalable. The system can handle the increasing number of students, the escalating volume of payments, and the expanding service portfolio without the need to involve additional administrative personnel. Thus, the grammar school has become not only more efficient but also more stable and future-proof. The project has demonstrated that appropriately designed AI and automation solutions can significantly alleviate the burden on an educational institution and provide operational advantages that are sustainable in the long term.
