Can someone settle an argument about how easy it should be to manage a database. Not for me. I don’t know shit, but assuming you know your stuff how hard is it to do the following:
- Maintain an online database of students who have applied to university through your organisation.
- Track (ie update manually) the status of each application, up to 7 or 8 per student, with dates for everything.
- Give each student a login so that they can see the status of their own applications.
- Give each university a login so that they can view details of all the students who have applied to them, and where else they have applied.
- Give each student a unique ID (number?) and each app a unique reference#.
From this starting point add the following features, either all at once or incrementally:
- A field to identify the source of each new customer, eg walk-in, referal, responding to promotion.
- Further fields to more clearly identify the source, eg which person in which location in which organisation referred the student.
- Assign logins to the individual sources and their parent organisations to track their progress
- Make the individual sources portable, ie they can move within (or even out of) their parent organisations and maintain their ID and ‘history’, although new business is credited to their new location.
- Assign higher level oversight, so that the progress of specific organisations, locations, and individuals can be monitored without having to hack into their accounts.
- Generate weekly and monthly stats on numbers referred and the results, source by source.
- Create the initial student record by means of an online form which also collects a lot of additional information useful in advising them.
- Log follow-ups to the initial registration, eg phone calls and meetings.
- Schedule future events related to the processing of the student. eg make a note to yourself to call the student back in one month, and have that note automatically appear somewhere when you login.
As I said, I don’t know shit. But I’m pretty sure I could do most of this (not the calendar stuff) pretty easily on an excel spreadsheet, with each tab correspomding to a different level of login. Is it massively harder online?
How much work are we talking about to put it together? A day? A week? A month? Obviously the data-entry would be done by office staff, not by a programmer. How much work is involved in maintaining it?
Thanks