Continuing-education institute: applications, payments, contracts

The task

The institute sells retraining and professional development programmes. A person or an organisation picks a programme, applies, pays, signs a contract, and studies. The institute has two legal entities, and their payments must not be mixed. When I joined, the sites were already live; the job was to move student enrolment and payments onto them.

What I did

From September 2015 to December 2017 I worked on the main site, sispp.ru, together with a colleague, and on the education portal.

• Online payment through Sberbank for both legal entities: payment status checks, paying by contract number, emails about payment attempts.
• Instalments and addenda. A manager set up instalments straight from the application instead of working out the schedule by hand.
• Contracts and printing. About 77 templates: contracts, offers, certificates of completion, and receipts were built as PDF from the application card.
• Applications from individuals and organisations with strict checks on dates and passport details, so the data fit the contract and the 1C export right away.
• New sections. Festivals and contests with voting and an archive, an inclusive education centre, and a separate page for the medical track with webinars and its own payments.
• Manager workspace. Promotions, a client base, tracking of course study plans, exports, and emails.
• The portal. I did most of the work on the portal: an events calendar and moving the research and methodology centre and the inclusion section over from the main site.
• Moodle. I took part in designing learning processes on Moodle, rolled out new features, and administered the system.
• Servers. I set up the hosting and web server and moved the sites.

What it changed

Application, payment, and documents became one chain on the site. There were fewer manual spreadsheets and fewer mistakes in contract details, and the two organisations' payments were kept apart.