Design team members: Alex Joyce, Katrina Koo
Supervisors: Dr. Stacey Scott (project advisor)
Background
Student-run clubs and organizations are a major part of a university’s campus. For example, at the University of Waterloo, there are over 160 student clubs run under the Federation of Students. Although the clubs vary in terms of type and amount of activity and number of active members, one thing that they all have in common is requirement to manage the club’s financial accounts. One identified challenge among these clubs is that there tends to be very poor record-keeping or financial management. The two main reasons for this is that the students managing the finances of the club often have very little accounting knowledge or experience and turnover is so high amongst these students year to year that it is almost impossible for good transition between executives. Professional accounting software is too expensive, too robust and unnecessary for a small, volunteer-run clubs or societies and current, free, online products are mostly geared towards keeping track of personal finances versus that of a group.
Project description
There exists an obvious void in existing products in tailoring to university club users where financial management of a team, with reporting, budgets and accommodation of unique processes is required. This project aims to create a customizable online financial tool for student clubs and societies to assist with basic accounting, transparency, book-keeping, budget creation, and financial analysis. The team will be building a tool for the student Engineering Society to use as our pilot project. The Society currently does all their finance processes on paper, which makes it hard to analyse trends over several terms, or to accurately budget without being able to easily pull up previous terms’ budgets. The project aims to: reduce the amount of manual paperwork that users must do so, increase transparency of club finances, intuitively demonstrate financial due diligence and analysis, automatically track and analyse budgets, be adaptable to different student clubs, and aid in helping clubs make better financial or fundraising decisions. The online tool will handle entry, storage and analysis of financial data for the club.
Design methodology
The tool will be built using extensive user-centered design philosophies to ensure that the needs, wants, and limitations of the users are extensively explored and integrated into the development of the software tool. Adoption and sustainability of the tool are essential to the success of the project. The project will use the several user-centered and software design stages. Similar digital financial management tools were investigated to get a range of potential functionality for the tool to be developed for this project. To determine project requirements and constraints, the team intensively investigated the existing finance process and users involved in current clubs. This will also help the team to ensure that we understand all the current processes and challenges, and develop new, web-based processes to improve the current record-keeping and transparency issues that they have. The team will also work through prototypes of the website throughout the process to the users so that they can constantly give feedback and to ensure that they agree with overall design layout and to ensure that the design is intuitive with a user-friendly interface. The team will plan development of code very carefully, prioritizing each process and feature to ensure that highest priority processes and features are implemented first. Unit testing will be an ongoing process to ensure operational core and feature functionality.