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INDUSTRY | INSIGHT: FINANCE SOF TWARE | 61
FINANCE FORCE
Technology is providing schools, colleges and universities with a range of exciting new options when it comes to managing money, from financial and administration packages to taking payments over the counter in outlets and canteens. Nick Valentine explores the field of financial solutions
A ‘KILLERAPP’ is a piece of software that is so powerful that people buy the computer just to get their hands on the program. For the PC, the original killer app was not word processing but the spreadsheet. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s
VisiCalc, developed in 1979, was largely responsible for the runaway success of that year’s Apple II personal computer. Similarly, sales of the 1981 IBM PCs were sluggish until Lotus 1-2-3 came along a year later, revolutionising the way people could use their PCs to automate management and accounting tasks. Then Excel, first introduced by Microsoft in the late 1990s,
ABOVE: Systopia's latest cashless payment terminal for all types of closed loop NFC contactless cards BELOW: Genesis: original Visicalc spreadsheet, vintage 1979
paradoxically, as an Apple program and later ported through to Windows, helped reinforce the Wintel dominance of personal computing. All of which underlines the
importance of accounting and financially oriented programs in the onward march of information technology. For the education sector, the help
that IT can provide in handling money and financial management has never been more important. The relentless pressures on
educational institutions to become efficient and sustainable businesses has placed ever-increasing emphasis on the coherence and efficacy of the their accounting and
management systems. At the same time, their search
for new revenue streams and more efficient ways of interacting with students, has brought schools, colleges and universities face-to- face with the complexities and the opportunities of card-based and other cashless payment systems. In both areas, there are
opportunities for educational establishments to harness technology to revolutionise their operations and make huge savings.
Cash costs The real costs of handling cash are frequently underestimated. Keeping it secure, moving it on and off site and bank handling
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