A School Fee Payment Portal for Private Secondary Schools in Lagos State

Collection of school fees in private secondary schools across Lagos State often involves cash handling, manual receipts, and unrecorded transactions, creating financial management inefficiencies. This study builds a web-based school fee payment portal for private secondary schools in Lagos State, South West Nigeria. The portal is developed using PHP Laravel, integrated with the Paystack and Flutterwave payment APIs to support bank transfers, card payments, and USSD options. The research follows the iterative and incremental model, with three development cycles informed by usability testing sessions involving 20 school bursars and 60 parent testers from Ikeja, Surulere, and Lekki. Core features include student enrollment records, fee schedule setup, online payment processing, automated receipt generation, payment history, and debt tracking. Financial reconciliation dashboards enable bursar oversight, while parent-facing notifications are delivered via email and SMS. Testing data shows a 95 percent payment success rate and a 40 percent reduction in fee arrears across pilot schools after one term of deployment. The study notes that internet access disparities between parents in high-income and low-income Lagos communities affect adoption equity and recommends USSD payment as a universal fallback. Recommendations also include integration with the Lagos State Schools Quality Assurance Authority database. Keywords: fee payment portal, Lagos, Paystack, school finance, private secondary school