Sample functional
requirements from the Student Information System RFP template: |
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Student Demographics
|
| Provide ability to automatically assign unique student ID number based on district-defined parameters (e.g. 10 digits). |
| Provide ability to display student's teacher assignments. |
| Support family information management with ability to link siblings and/or household members. |
| Provide ability to optionally enroll students in multiple school sites in the district. |
| Support Special Education, GATE and Chapter 1 tracking and reporting. |
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Scheduling
|
| Provide a district-defined master course directory that includes course code, title, description and department for each course. |
| Provide automatic resource allocation function that assigns periods to course sections to create a master schedule. |
| Generate conflict matrices (of conflicting courses) to assist in decision-making and building of master schedule. |
| Provide flexibility for individual schools in district to schedule quarter, trimester, semester or full year courses. |
| Support interactive on-line scheduling for new students and changes (e.g. schedule student's classes and print in one operation). |
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Attendance
|
| Allow district to define school calendars that include legal holidays, half-days, in-service days and staff development days. |
| Provide ability to enter and view attendance information on-line at the classroom. |
| Support tracking of absences for students attending courses at multiple school sites. |
| Allow system administrator to configure number and types of absences which will trigger parent notification letters. |
| Compute and report ADA (Average Daily Attendance). |
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Grade Reporting
|
| Support entry of grades and comments through mark sense scanner or keyboard entry. |
| Provide ability to define 10 different Grade Point Average (GPA) computations based on state and local needs with the flexibility to redefine these GPA formulas. |
| Provide ability to identify and report weighted grade marks, college prep courses, repeated courses, courses taken outside of the district, and academic versus non-academic courses. |
| Allow teachers to enter grades independently on PC in classroom or at home with ability to upload to district host system (e.g. electronic gradebook). |
| Provide ability to transmit transcripts electronically. |
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Discipline
|
| Provide ability to maintain, track and report on discipline records for individual students. |
| Support tracking of classroom behavior modification techniques implemented. |
| Provide ability to flag a student as perpetrator, victim or witness for each incident. |
| Print parental notification letters regarding a student's discipline and attendance problems. |
| Print in-school suspension and detention lists by date for roll taking. |
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Health Records
|
| Support on-line maintenance and reporting of student's health information and state-required immunizations. |
| Maintain student health information including: screenings for vision, hearing, dental and spinal (dates and results). |
| Display indicator in student's health history for: allergies with narrative field for description. |
| Support user-defined health codes for complaints, treatments, actions and medications. |
| Maintain complete history of all student health room visits. |
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Locker Management
|
| Provide ability to assign students to book, physical education, and athletic lockers. |
| Provide ability to assign master combinations from a table of at least six combinations. |
| Support a minimum of five types of lockers and six combinations for each. |
| Support at least three designations for the location of each locker (e.g. top, middle, bottom). |
| Print reports of lockers, assigned students by school, locker type, and grade level. |
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Human Resources
|
| Provide human resource management functions to track applicants, substitute teachers, current employees, assignments, past experience and continuing education. |
| Maintain information on and track classified and certificated non-management, management, confidential, temporary, substitutes, mentor teachers and other employee sub-groups. |
| Print personnel directories (by school or district-wide) with employee address, phone and other information. |
| Support automatic encumbering of salary and benefits for new hires, and disencumbering of remaining salary and benefit amounts upon position changes. |
| Provide ability to simulate the financial impact of potential contract salary changes and project the impact based on differing salary increases for certificated and classified positions. |
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Payroll
|
| Support payroll system that meets all current and future federal and state payroll reporting requirements. |
| Support district-defined salary grade, step and pay rate tables for classified and certificated employees. |
| Provide on-line access to employee profile, benefit, deduction and absence information with year-to date totals and available balances. |
| Automatically post payroll and fringe benefit expenditures to salary and benefit accounts in financial accounting system. |
| Support direct deposit to multiple financial institutions using industry standard ACH (Automated Clearing House) protocols. |
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Budget Accounting
|
| The budgeting system should be designed for fund accounting and meet all state requirements. |
| Provide ability to restrict users to accounts they have control over for purchasing and inquiry purposes. |
| Provide ability to annualize actual expenses for the current year for comparison purposes. |
| Provide ability to perform "what-if" scenarios to model various approaches to budget prioritization and projections for future years. |
| Provide ability to report what percent of the budget has been used by account, required operating activity, department, program, etc. |
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Accounts Payable
|
| Provide ability to expense funds for the invoice amount, recognize a payable in the corresponding fund and automatically liquidate the corresponding encumbrance amount. |
| Provide ability to set-up recurring monthly payments. |
| Support user-defined tolerances in invoice reconciliation process including: invoice quantity different than purchase order. |
| Provide ability to view a summary vendor aging on-line and drill down selectively by vendor to see detail items. |
| Print cash requirements report for the next 90 days including open payables and purchase orders issued. |
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Purchasing
|
| Support on-line requisition and purchase order tracking with single or multiple level authorization requirements. |
| Provide ability to route requisitions and purchase orders electronically to managers' queues for on-line approvals. |
| Support Internet WWW hyperlinks to vendors' web sites for ordering through vendor sites, but still record orders within purchasing system. |
| Support automatic entry of contract price into price fields on contract or blanket orders within purchase order entry functions. |
| Print vendor performance analysis report listing vendors price, quality and delivery record. |
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Inventory
|
| Track and control stock for multiple locations within warehouse. |
| Provide ability to track non-inventoried items (e.g. office supplies). |
| Maintain at least three units of measure for transaction conversion purposes in inventory master file. |
| Maintain MSDS (federal material safety data sheet) required indicator in inventory master file. |
| Print inventory analysis report showing financial and stock movement of items in inventory. |
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Technical & Support
|
| Provide complete turnkey on-site implementation and project management support. |
| Provide on-site training to users. |
| Provide user-friendly report generator software with graphical user interface. |
| Provide data management features that eliminate the redundant maintenance of duplicate data (e.g. relational database, etc.). |
| Provide future software releases and updates to all applications as part of regular software maintenance fees. |
| ►More
requirements are included in the actual RFP template. |
Selecting a new Administrative or Student Information System?
sponses.