🎓 Fees Management System
Full-stack web application for managing institutional fees — built as the ALX Africa software engineering programme portfolio project. Demonstrates full-stack development capability with a secure, real-world application.
Project Overview
The Fees Management System is a comprehensive web-based platform designed during the ALX Africa Software Engineering Programme. Its core objective is to digitalize, streamline, and secure the collection and management of school or institutional fees—transitioning administrators away from error-prone spreadsheet tracking.
While this project focuses heavily on full-stack web development principles rather than strictly cybersecurity operations, it serves as a testament to solid coding practices, secure authentication design, and understanding the complete software development lifecycle.
Technical Implementation
The application relies on a classical LAMP stack—Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP—augmented with modern JavaScript for front-end interactivity. This architecture ensures wide compatibility and ease of deployment on affordable shared hosting or VPS instances.
Security considerations were baked into the system early on. Passwords are theoretically hashed using strong algorithms (like Argon2 or bcrypt based on PHP configuration), and SQL statements are parameterized via PDO to mitigate the risk of ubiquitous SQL injection flaws. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensures students can only view their own ledgers, while administrators have full reporting privileges.
Key Features / Findings
- Secure multi-tier login system (Admin vs Student).
- Real-time financial dashboard and ledger reporting.
- PDF receipt generation for finalized transactions.
- Parameterized backend queries to prevent SQL injections.
- Responsive UI built from scratch using custom CSS.