Student records split across separate systems for enrolment, course registration, library access, and research administration, with no reliable data flow between any of them?
Academic staff manually compiling data from multiple platforms every time they need a complete picture of a student's standing or a faculty member's research output?
Higher Education Software Development
Custom software for universities, colleges, and professional education providers -- student records, course registration, academic advising, faculty management, and research administration in systems that share data rather than duplicate it across six separate platforms with no reliable connection between them.
Built for institutions where staff spend their days re-entering data between systems and where students get inconsistent information depending on which portal they happen to check.
Student information system with enrolment, academic history, grade management, and transcript generation
Online course registration with prerequisite checking, waitlist management, and timetable clash detection
Academic advising tools with degree progress tracking and student caseload management for advisors
Faculty portal with grade submission, attendance recording, and research output tracking
RaftLabs builds custom higher education software for universities, colleges, and professional education providers. Projects cover student information systems with enrolment and transcript generation, online course registration with prerequisite checking and waitlist management, academic advising tools with degree progress tracking, faculty portals for grade submission and research output tracking, alumni and continuing education management, and research and grant management with ethics approval workflows. Most higher education software projects deliver in 14-20 weeks at a fixed cost with full source code ownership.
100+Products shipped
·5+EdTech clients
·FixedCost delivery
·12-14Week delivery cycles
Universities run on a complexity of systems. None of them talk to each other reliably.
The pattern is consistent across higher education institutions. One system holds the student record and demographic data. A second handles course registration. A third manages library access. A fourth tracks research administration and grant funding. Attendance may live in a spreadsheet. Faculty research outputs go into a separate academic repository. None of these systems share data automatically, so staff spend their days re-entering information that already exists somewhere else in a different format.
Students feel the same fragmentation. They check one portal for their course schedule, a different one for their grade history, and a third for their degree progress. Information is inconsistent between them because each system is updated independently. Custom higher education software brings the systems that should share data into a coherent architecture -- not by replacing every platform overnight, but by building the integrations and the purpose-built tools your institution actually needs for the workflows that matter most.
What we build
Student information system
Student records covering enrolment, demographic data, academic history, and contact details for the student and their nominated contacts. Grade recording and weighted grade calculation configured for the credit system and grading scale your institution uses. Transcript generation on demand, with official transcript workflow for third-party requests. Graduation audit that checks completed credits against degree requirements and flags outstanding obligations before a student's final term. Full academic history from first enrolment through every year and qualification, retained in one record that moves with the student rather than being archived in a disconnected system.
Course registration and timetabling
Online course selection interface where students browse available courses, check prerequisites, and register for the upcoming term. Prerequisite and co-requisite checking at the point of registration, with clear messaging when a student does not yet meet the requirements. Waitlist management that tracks registration demand and automatically moves students from the waitlist when a place opens. Timetable generation that detects lecture and tutorial clashes across a student's selected courses before registration is confirmed. Room and resource allocation matched to class size and equipment requirements, with clash detection for the institution's physical spaces.
Academic advising and degree planning
Student-facing degree progress tracker showing completed credits, credits in progress, and the remaining requirements for their programme, with suggested next courses based on what is available in the upcoming term. Advisor dashboard showing each advisor's full student caseload with flags for students who have not registered for an upcoming term, students with a grade below a threshold, and students approaching a credit limit. Advising notes recorded against the student record and visible to all authorised advisors rather than held in an individual email thread. Meeting scheduling and appointment history retained per student so advising context is available regardless of which advisor is covering a student's caseload.
Faculty portal
Faculty access to their course rosters for the current and upcoming terms, with grade submission interfaces that feed directly into the student record without requiring administrator re-entry. Attendance recording per class session, with the option for a mobile interface for faculty who take attendance in person. Office hour scheduling published to students in the portal, with appointment booking and cancellation managed through the system rather than by email. Research output tracking where faculty record publications, conference presentations, and grant activity, feeding into the institution's research reporting without a separate data collection exercise at year end.
Alumni and continuing education management
Alumni directory with contact details maintained over time and engagement tracking showing which alumni have participated in events, mentoring programmes, or fundraising campaigns. Fundraising campaign management with donor history, pledge tracking, and campaign response rates visible to the development team. Continuing professional development enrolment for alumni returning to the institution for short courses, certificates, or professional development programmes -- with their historical academic record available to staff without accessing the active student system. Event invitation and RSVP management for reunions, lectures, and industry networking events, with attendance history retained per alumnus.
Research and grant management
Research project tracking with project details, team members, milestones, and status visible to principal investigators and research office staff. Grant application management covering pre-submission workflow, institutional sign-off, submission records, and outcome tracking. Budget monitoring per grant with expenditure recorded against approved budget lines and alerts when spending approaches the grant limit. Ethics approval workflow for research projects requiring institutional ethics review, with submission, review assignment, feedback, and approval recorded in the system. Publication record management for journal articles, conference papers, and other outputs linked to the relevant project and grant funding source. Reporting for national research funding bodies generated from the system rather than compiled manually.
Frequently asked questions
Integration depends on what your current systems expose. Most enterprise platforms used in higher education -- Banner, PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle -- have APIs or batch export capabilities that allow data exchange. We build integration layers that pull data from your existing systems into the new platform and push updates back, so you are not running two separate records for the same data. For institutions replacing a legacy SIS entirely, we handle the data migration from the old system into the new one. For institutions adding a module alongside an existing system, we build the integration so the two platforms stay in sync without manual re-entry.
Yes. The academic calendar configuration is flexible -- you define your term structure, including the number of terms per year, term start and end dates, registration windows, grade submission deadlines, and the rules that govern credit accumulation across terms. Semester, trimester, quarter, and modular structures are all configurable. If your institution uses a combination of structures across different programmes or faculties, those can be set up independently per programme with shared student records across the institution. The calendar configuration is managed by administrators, not hard-coded.
Student record systems fall under data privacy regulations that vary by jurisdiction -- FERPA in the United States, GDPR in Europe and the UK, PIPEDA in Canada, and similar frameworks elsewhere. We build the data access model so that student data is only visible to staff with a legitimate educational interest. Parent and guardian access to adult student records follows the rules your institution sets -- FERPA, for example, requires explicit student consent for adult students. Data retention policies are configured to retain records for the required period and archive or delete them on schedule when a student departs. Audit trails log all record access and changes. We review the specific regulatory requirements that apply to your institution during scoping.
A focused module -- such as a student information system covering enrolment, grade recording, and transcript generation -- typically delivers in 12-14 weeks. A broader platform covering course registration, academic advising, faculty portal, and research management typically runs 18-24 weeks depending on integration complexity and the number of compliance report formats required. Cost depends on the scope of modules, the number of existing system integrations, and whether mobile interfaces are needed alongside web platforms. We scope every project and give you a fixed cost before development starts.
Tell us your institution type, the systems you are currently running, and the workflows causing the most friction. We will scope the right platform and give you a fixed cost.
