A tutoring academy on one system, from first enquiry to invoice.

The challenge

A tutoring business is a scheduling problem wearing a customer-service costume. Every enquiry has to be qualified, matched to a tutor who teaches that subject and is close enough to be practical, booked into a trial, converted, then given a timetable that runs to the end of term. After that it becomes a communication problem: parents want to know how their child is going, tutors need lesson history, and someone has to raise the invoices.

None of it lived in one place. Enquiries arrived through several channels and were tracked by hand, so nobody could say which marketing actually produced enrolments — or why a lead that got as far as a booked trial never came back. Lesson notes sat with individual tutors. Timetables were rebuilt manually each term. Invoicing was separate again.

What we built

The first release established the spine: students, tutors, lessons, scheduling and invoicing in one place, with role-based access rather than one shared login. We then expanded that spine into the full operations platform the academy runs on today.

• A full lead lifecycle CRM — every prospective student tracked from enquiry to enrolment or loss, with configurable pipeline stages and a timestamped activity history
• Lead source tracking, so channel performance is a report rather than a guess
• Lost-lead analytics capturing stage, reason, subject, year level and suburb — enough structure to see where conversion actually breaks
• Trial lesson management, with structured observations linked back to the lead record
• Tutor lesson notes after every lesson — topics covered, progress, difficulties, homework, focus for next time
• A parent portal: upcoming lessons, attendance, lesson notes where enabled, invoice history and PDF download, announcements, messaging with tutors
• A tutor portal: timetable, student profiles, lesson notes, attendance, availability and teaching resources
• Tutor matching ranked on subject expertise first, then proximity, then availability — a recommendation an administrator confirms, never an automatic assignment
• Automated term scheduling: recurring lessons generated to end of term, reviewed and adjusted before confirmation
• Invoicing with per-parent history, PDF generation and flexible payment frequencies
• A communication centre holding internal chat, parent-to-tutor messaging and email relay in one history
• Automated operational emails on defined events — enquiry acknowledgement, trial confirmation and follow-up, enrolment, invoice issued and overdue, cancellations and reschedules
• Reporting across pipeline and conversion, lead source, trial conversion, enrolments, tutor utilisation, and revenue and outstanding invoices

AI, deliberately bounded

There’s an AI administration assistant, and its job description is narrow on purpose: draft emails to parents and tutors, and generate formatted documents from approved templates. Every output is a draft a person reviews before it’s sent. It does not send email on its own, write student reports, generate lesson plans, or answer questions on the academy’s behalf. Matching recommends; a person decides.

The technical foundation

Three user types, three genuinely different views — role-based access from the schema up, not permissions bolted onto one interface. Administrators see the whole operation, tutors see their own students and timetable, parents see their own child. Lesson notes stay internal unless visibility is deliberately enabled.

Where it stands

The platform is live and in full use — every enquiry, trial, timetable, lesson note and invoice runs through it. We’re now in ongoing support, keeping it running and improving it as the academy grows.