Case Study · Hart College
How UnlockLive replaced three disconnected tools and one shared inbox with a single, custom Student Information System for a Canadian career college — a public Next.js course catalog, a student-facing enrolment + Stripe tuition portal, and a Django admin console for batches, courses, coupons, candidates, and document attachments. Net result: 100% of tuition collected online, 5x faster enrolment, and zero reconciliation spreadsheets.
Hart College ran admissions on a public marketing site, course registration on a separate spreadsheet, tuition collection by cheque and e-transfer, and student communication through a shared inbox. Nothing reconciled. Admins re-keyed every new student into three places, the registrar had no single answer to 'who is enrolled in this intake?', and finance burned a full week each month chasing missing payments and matching them against names that didn't quite agree across systems.
The ask was deceptively simple: replace all of it with one Student Information System (SIS) where a prospect could discover a course on a public marketing page, enrol in a specific intake, pay tuition online, see their schedule and payment history in a self-serve portal — and an admin could create batches, courses, coupons, candidates, and attachments from a single dashboard with no parallel spreadsheets and no reconciliation work at month-end.
We built a single, custom SIS in three coordinated surfaces: a public Next.js course catalog, a student-facing enrolment + tuition portal, and a Django + Django REST Framework admin console — all backed by PostgreSQL and a Stripe Payments + Webhooks integration that keeps the SIS as the single source of truth for every dollar.
The public site ships a fast, SEO-tuned Next.js catalog: each course has its own indexable detail page, intake schedule, prerequisites, tuition breakdown, and inline 'Enrol now' CTA — so the marketing site is also the top of the enrolment funnel, not a separate brochure. Once a prospect clicks through, they land in a Stripe Checkout session created server-side with the right amount, currency, coupon, and intake ID baked into the metadata.
On payment success, a Stripe webhook lands on the Django API and idempotently creates or updates the student, links them to the chosen batch, attaches the receipt, and emails confirmation — all in a single signed transaction. The student's portal then exposes 'My Courses', 'My Schedule', 'My Tuition' (with full payment + refund history) and a documents tab for transcripts, ID, and signed agreements.
The Django admin console gives the registrar one place to run the entire program: create a batch, attach courses and faculty, define coupon codes (percentage or flat, scoped per intake or per course), upload candidate records and attachments, push announcements, and pull enrolment + revenue reports without ever opening Excel. Roles separate registrar, finance, faculty, and admin so each user only sees the surface they need.
Finally, we wired Stripe webhooks idempotently, locked tuition records against a checksum so finance can prove the SIS and Stripe agree, instrumented every endpoint with Sentry + CloudWatch, and stored every signed PDF / ID upload in S3 with time-bounded signed URLs (no raw object access).
We sat with the registrar and finance teams for a week and mapped every place a student record was created, edited, or paid for — across the marketing site, the registration spreadsheet, the bank, the email inbox, and the shared drive. Out of that came an intake-aware data model with first-class concepts of `Batch`, `Course`, `Coupon`, `Candidate`, and `Tuition` — instead of bolting student state onto a generic CRM.
We shipped a fast, SEO-tuned Next.js public catalog with one indexable page per course and inline 'Enrol now' CTAs that hand off to a server-created Stripe Checkout session with intake + coupon metadata baked in. The student-facing portal then surfaces schedule, payment history, receipts, and document uploads. The marketing site is the funnel, not a brochure.
On the operations side, we shipped a Django + Django REST Framework admin: batch / course / coupon / candidate / attachment CRUD, role separation between registrar, finance, faculty, and admin, and an enrolment + revenue reports surface. Stripe webhooks land idempotently into a single Django endpoint that creates / updates the student, links them to the right batch, writes the tuition row, and emails confirmation in one signed transaction.
We locked tuition rows against a checksum so finance can prove the SIS and Stripe agree at any moment, stored every signed PDF / ID upload in S3 with time-bounded signed URLs, and instrumented every endpoint with Sentry + CloudWatch. The registrar got a runbook for opening a new intake, issuing a coupon, refunding a tuition payment, and exporting an enrolment report — and we stayed on retainer for enhancements.
Two safeguards. (1) The webhook handler is idempotent: every Stripe `event.id` is checked against an `processed_webhooks` table before any write, so a retry is a no-op. (2) Every tuition row stores a checksum derived from `(student_id, batch_id, amount, currency, coupon_code, stripe_payment_intent)`. Finance can run a one-line reconciliation query at any time to prove SIS rows and Stripe charges agree — no Excel, no human pairing, no end-of-month panic.
We treat `Batch` as a first-class entity, not a tag on a student. A batch carries its own start date, capacity, courses, and faculty assignments. A student belongs to one or more batches; a coupon can be scoped per intake or per course; reports filter by batch in a single click. This is the difference between 'a CRM with an intake field' and a real SIS — and it's why the registrar no longer keeps a parallel spreadsheet.
Yes. The data model is institution-agnostic — `Batch`, `Course`, `Coupon`, `Candidate`, `Attachment`, `Tuition` are not Hart-specific. A second institution can be onboarded by re-skinning the Next.js front-end and provisioning a new Stripe account; the Django admin and the underlying schema are reusable. We've designed it so that extending into K-12, vocational training, and continuing-education programs is a configuration change, not a re-build.
Five months end-to-end with a four-person team (1 product/PM, 2 full-stack engineers, 1 designer). Roughly: 3 weeks of discovery and registrar shadowing; 12 weeks of Django REST API + Next.js public catalog + student portal + admin console; 3 weeks of Stripe webhook hardening, S3 attachment work, observability, and registrar training; 2 weeks of pilot intake before opening the next live intake on the new SIS.
A Next.js (React) public site and student/admin portals, a Django + Django REST Framework API, PostgreSQL for transactional data, Stripe Payments + Webhooks for tuition, AWS S3 for document attachments, and Sentry + CloudWatch for observability — all containerized with Docker and deployed via infrastructure-as-code.
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Talk to the same team that built Custom Student Information System (SIS) for a Canadian Career College — Course Catalog, Multi-Intake Enrolment, Stripe Tuition & Coupon-Driven Admin (Next.js + Django + PostgreSQL). We’ll scope your project, give you a fixed-price proposal, and show you the closest analog from our portfolio.
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