Point Pay - Track & pay on the go!

Secure QR payment and real-time tracking platform mainly for universities and companies' transport.

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Inspiration

Karachi is a huge city where thousands of students use university points as their daily commute to the university. NED University is no exception. Right now, NED University is seriously lacking in the process of fee payment of bus shuttles. It’s quite slow, inefficient, and lacks transparency. Students also find this routine of fee payment very hectic hence they avoid and feel discouraged from paying their shuttle fees. PointPay is purely based on the idea of making this structure more reliable, modern, and secure than ever. The functionality of the application is planned to be designed in a way that the process is faster and more efficient while keeping security and transparency in mind.

What it does

Point pay provides three core functionalities using modern areas of technology.

  1. PTQ - Payment Through QR code, to enhance and modernize the hectic payment & shuttles card generation process.
  2. GPS tracking, to provide ease for students through real-time point tracking.
  3. Dashboard for the organizations, to manage monthly fee records with absolute ease and transparency and monitoring of all shuttles.

How we built it

Focusing on the payment and tracking of the shuttles to ease the facility for students & companies' workers, and virtualize the management system of Organizations.

PointPay is a full-fledged software having two interfaces;

one is the web application that will be accessible to Organizations' staff only, the other is the mobile app that will be used by the students. The web app would contain an authorized login. The admin would have the right to see the payment history of all the students. A filter drop-down would allow searching department-wise, month-wise, etc. The admin will also be able to send notifications/messages to the driver and/or the students for reminders etc. The admin will be completely authorized to generate a QR code every month for payment by the students. There will be a complete map view on the admin panel for monitoring of the points and their respective locations.

The mobile app will provide a register/login for the users. Once the student registers and logs in, he/she will be added to the admin database. On the creation of a profile, students will be asked to upload a clear picture of themselves. We’ll be using AI/ML algorithms to detect automatically the validity of the uploaded according to the standards of the University.

The student will be required to pay through QR code scanning. The payment transfer will be done through EasyPaisa. Once the students pay through their Easypaisa account they’ll be rewarded with credit points equal to what they paid.

Another aspect of the software is the ‘tracking system’ for students. This way they’ll be able to track their points. This system would also be responsible for monitoring traffic for each point. In case of too much traffic, the driver will be informed through a message on their phones. This aspect of the project would predict time(to reach University) upon monitoring traffic.

The motive behind this software is to use it as a service in all kinds of institutes, universities, and companies that provide transport services. This virtual payment system will ease the hectic payment routine for the students and make management easy for the University. The tracking system would give authority to the admin for closer monitoring of the points and help students too.

Challenges we ran into

  1. EASY to use - As a developing country with low literacy, people are not much familiar with modern technology. A significant usecase from organization side of our platform depends on the people older than 35 years (Organiation's staff, drivers, condectors, University shuttle staff), so making this platform very very easy to use was the biggest challenge. We tried our best to keep everything as simple as possible. Either the functionality or the user interface, every aspect of our platform is super easy to understand and to use.
  2. Not to decrease employment - Keeping the employement rate in mind, we were compelled to make project in such a way that the current job of any entitiy will not be removed. Our philosophy is to improve the effeciency and transparency of all roles (university staff, drivers and condectors) by using technology rather than to entirely replace them with technology.
  3. Budget friendly Usually, organizations or universities have a mindsets to implement things with the lowest and cheapest charges. So we tried our best to eliminate the hardware (GPS trakcers, WIFI devices from shuttles etc) and maintainance cost. Any organization will use our service by just subscribing our service after its launch.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. After a presentation to the director services of NED UET, we got a permission letter so our project is acceptable under the supervision of NCCS - the national center of cyber security. lead by Dr. Asad Arfeen.
  2. Using modern tech stack for solving the real-world & daily problem is itself an accomplishment for us
  3. Formation of a capable team, which can develop a million-dollar product anytime in the future.

What we learned

  1. How QR payment works
  2. GPS tracking by google maps services and mobile app.
  3. Team work

What's next for Point Pay

The next step is to present Point Pay - The dearest project of our group to different universities and launch it as a SaaS platform, which can be subscribed to help thousands of people struggling for their transport timing in the morning while standing at the bus stop.

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