Forma

The problem

Many schools in Ghana already have something digital — a fees app, a results spreadsheet, an attendance register on a teacher’s phone — but nothing that holds the whole term in one place. Parents message the bursar for balances. Teachers mark attendance in one book and grades in another. The head asks three people before they can answer how the class is doing, or who still owes for Term 2.

What I built

Forma puts students, classes, fees, attendance, results, and staff on one web system with clear roles: bursar, teacher, head, parent, student. It is browser-first. The architecture is multi-school SaaS: each school’s data stays isolated. I built the architecture, billing, portals, and deploy.

• Has this child paid — and for which term?
• Who was absent this week — without re-counting the register?
• What did this learner get last term — without hunting files?
• Can parents see their own fees and reports — without calling the office?

What the school can run

People

Student enrolment, classes, promotion, staff — one record per child for the year.

Finance

Fee types, billing, receipts, arrears by term, waivers and scholarships where enabled.

Academics

Grading, report slips, transcripts, class summaries — tied to the real term and class.

Attendance

Daily marks and term summaries parents and admin can export.

Portals

Parent and student views for fees, results, timetables, and term documents.

Operations

Timetables, feeding and bus records, announcements, SMS where schools use it.

Governance

Role-based access so bursars, teachers, and heads see only what they should.

What changed

• One term, one record — fees, attendance, and results link to the same student and academic year.
• Parents stop chasing the office — balances and term documents live in the portal when the school enables them.
• Heads get visibility — class and finance picture without walking to the bursar’s desk.
• Upgrade path, not rip-and-replace — schools can move off paper or retire a single-purpose app module by module.

I position Forma for Ghanaian basic and secondary schools that want their own ledger in the cloud — from paper ledgers to schools outgrowing single-purpose software — not another dashboard nobody trusts after the first week.

Stack

Next.js · TypeScript · tRPC · PostgreSQL · AWS · PDF / print exports