Overview

This article will explain how an institution can handle students' request for accommodation and assign them to suitable rooms based on needs/requirements.

Note: This will require the Housing Extension Package.

(Try out our RIO Challenge here for a practical exercise.)

Use case

A student named Fred Smith is requesting for accommodation on campus grounds.

The student is male, thus, he should be assigned with only male roommates (since there are no available single rooms left).

Fred the student will make a Housing application via the Student Portal (Community), where he will fill a form to provide his information as well as requirements and medical conditions (if any).

For example, the application form will ask the applicant's sleeping time preference. In Fred's case, he has specified that he prefers sleeping before midnight (meaning he should be paired with a roommate that does the same).

Once the request form has been submitted, a Housing application record will be automatically generated in the admin console.

Admin will then use the Room Allocation Wizard, to identify Fred by narrowing down the list of students based on the arrival date.

When searching for rooms, the admin can compare available rooms and suitable roommates that sleep before midnight, which will be a good match with Fred's preference.

See below on setting up records of facilities (i.e. rooms, dormitories) for student accommodation.

The admin can then allocate Fred to that room. It will now be fully allocated and reflected accordingly.

Here is a sample recording on how to use the Room Allocation Wizard.

Set up

Room Allocation Wizard and facilities

To find out more on configuring the Room Allocation Wizard and facilities for this feature, see here.

Housing Fees

There are multiple ways to generate Housing Fees for students who have been allocated with Housing.

For an individual student

Admin will need to locate the student's Program Enrollment‍ and enter into the Student Fee record in order to check the “Generate Housing Fees” checkbox.

This will find any related Housing records linked to that student's Program Enrollment, and create a Fee Line for it.

Note: It will also look through all related Housing Extras to see if any Fees need to be added to this Student Fee. It will check Applicable Term Labels and Status.

Any new Housing Extras that are added after the "Generate Housing Fees" checkbox has been marked, will not be added automatically.

For all students within a semester

If there are multiple students in the same semester who have been allocated with housing, it is impractical to generate their fees for each individual student.

Admin can generate Housing Fees for all the students who have been allocated with Housing in the same Term.

The “Generate Housing Fees” checkbox on Term will mark the checkbox on every Student Fee with a link to a PE Pathway for this Term.

Because this runs as a batch process, this may take a couple of minutes to complete. If any errors occur during this process, a new EDA Error record will be created with more details. This can be searched/filtered by Context Type = “redu_Term_CreateHousingFees_BATCH”

Note: Any new Student Fees created after this checkbox has been marked will not be affected, and will need to be generated individually.

From Housing Application Screen Flow

The "Generate Housing Fee" screen flow utilizes the "Generate Housing Fees" checkbox on Student Fee to invoke the housing fee generation.

Please see the RIO Ready: House Fee Generation‍ (RIO Ready) for more details.

Trigger Handlers

Fee configuration

Fees

• Fees are created like normal. Create your Fee(s), Fee Schedule(s), Fee Schedule Term(s), and then approve the Fee Schedule(s).

Term Labels

• Each Term has a Term Label field. This can be used to denote the type of Term.
  
  
• Housing Extras have an Applicable Term label field, and when setting up Housing Extras, you can specify to only add the fee to the applicable Terms.

Custom Label

• There is a Custom Label called Housing_Fee_Description. Every Housing Extra fee line will have this custom label as its description. 
  
  
• You can edit this label and include custom merge fields from the Housing Extra record by using its API name surrounded by {! and }
  • E.g. Using the Quantity field would be {!rio_edhouse__Quantity__c} .
    
    
• There is also a custom merge field if you want to use the standard Fee Description field like our normal Fees.
  • Use {!FEESCEHDULEDESCRITION} .
    
    
• By default, this label is {!rio_edhouse__Quantity__c}x  {!FEESCEHDULEDESCRITION} .