For academies where the timetable is the payroll
In a tutoring centre almost everything traces back to one fact: which lesson actually happened. It decides what the instructor is paid, whether a student is owed a make-up, and what the guardian gets told. When that fact lives in a group chat and a printed timetable with pen corrections, the end of term becomes a reconciliation exercise nobody has time for. NOWORX keeps the timetable, the hours and the money on the same record.
If this keeps happening
Hours taught, not hours scheduled
Part-time instructors are paid for lessons that actually ran. A cancellation, a cover, a Saturday make-up — each one changes the number, and each is recorded as a message in a chat thread that nobody reconciles until pay day. The instructor remembers one figure, the office has another, and the difference is settled by whoever pushes harder.
Fee cycles that all start on different dates
Students enrol mid-month, pause for exams, come back and switch courses. Who is paid up to when gets reconstructed from bank transfer names that rarely match the student's, and the family that has quietly not paid for two months is discovered by accident.
Notices to guardians with no way to know they landed
Closures, exam schedules and fee changes go out as a broadcast into a channel nobody confirms. The centre learns the message didn't reach one family when a student is dropped off outside a closed building on a holiday.
The trial lesson nobody followed up
Enquiries arrive by phone and message to whichever staff member is at the desk that evening. Whether the family gets a call back depends entirely on who took it and what else happened in the next two hours — and no one knows how many enquiries were lost that way last month.
A make-up class squeezed into an occupied room
Rooms and the one set of shared equipment are booked informally, usually verbally. A rescheduled class collides with a regular one and two groups end up standing in the corridor while someone finds a solution in front of the students.
How the work runs in NOWORX
Tap an app name in any step to see what it does.
- 1
From enquiry to enrolment
Every enquiry lands in one place instead of in the phone of whoever answered. sales-pipeline holds the family from first contact through trial lesson to enrolment, with the next action and its owner visible, so a follow-up doesn't depend on someone's evening memory — and the admissions agent flags the enquiries that have gone quiet before they go cold. form-builder handles enrolment and the details you need collected once and accurately, rather than a paper form retyped later. The enrolled student, the guardian's contact of record and the course they're on live in client-directory, which is the roster the rest of the centre works from.
- 2
Timetable, rooms and make-up lessons
team-calendar carries the real timetable — regular classes, cover, one-off sessions and the make-up lessons that are always the hardest part — so a change is visible to everyone rather than to the two people in the conversation. reservation-board holds rooms and shared equipment, which is what stops a rescheduled class colliding with a regular one, and it works the same way across branches that share a building or a resource. resource-usage shows which rooms and which slots are actually saturated, which is the information you need before adding a class or a room rather than after.
- 3
From lessons taught to instructor pay
This is the join that most centres do by hand. attendance-board records the lesson that actually ran and who taught it, including cover and make-ups, so the hours are confirmed while they are still fresh instead of at the end of the month. Changes — a cancelled session, an added Saturday, an agreed rate for cover — pass through approval-dashboard so the number that reaches pay has a decision behind it. payroll-ledger builds from those confirmed hours rather than from a rebuilt spreadsheet, and daily-report gives instructors a light way to note what happened in the session without writing an essay.
- 4
Fees, receipts and the centre's books
ledger keeps fee status against the student record, so 'paid up to when' is a field rather than an investigation across bank statements. The finance agent prepares the reminders on each family's own cycle and flags payments it cannot match, which is the single most time-consuming job in a centre of any size. tax-invoice-view keeps issued and received documents together, expense-insight shows where money actually goes — materials, rent, instructor cost by branch — and data-browser answers the questions that determine whether a course is worth running at all.
- 5
What guardians and students are told
The centre's problem is rarely the message, it is that three staff give three versions of it. notice-digest holds the approved wording for a closure, an exam schedule or a change to arrangements, so whoever is at the desk that evening answers the same way the office does. poll-vote collects the answers you need back — who is attending the intensive week, which slot families prefer — as a count instead of forty replies. form-builder covers consent and information collection that used to be a paper slip, and slides handles the briefing for parent evenings and instructor training.
Frequently asked questions
Does this hold student grades or assessment records?
It is an operations tool, not a teaching or assessment system. Keep marks, assessments and learning records where teaching actually happens; what belongs here is the operational layer — who is enrolled, which lessons ran, who taught them, what was paid. Because many of your students are minors, we would also encourage keeping the personal data you hold to the minimum you actually need and restricting who can see it by role.
Our instructors come in for a few hours a week. Do they all need accounts?
Yes, but their view is small on purpose: their own timetable, confirming the lessons they taught, and the notices that concern them. They do not see fee status, other instructors' hours or the centre's finances. For someone teaching six hours a week the interaction is a minute on a phone, which is the only thing that gets used consistently.
What if an instructor forgets to confirm a lesson?
The agent chases before the cut-off rather than after it, which is when the information is still recoverable. If a correction is needed afterwards it goes through an approval step with a reason attached, so hours that feed pay are never quietly edited — which protects the office and the instructor equally when a figure is questioned.
Does NOWORX send messages to guardians directly?
Guardians sit outside your workspace, so no — the pattern is different and deliberately so. The notice is drafted, approved and published inside NOWORX so that every member of staff gives the same answer and the current version is unambiguous; delivery to families goes out through whatever channel you already use with them. What you gain is one approved wording and a record of it, instead of four staff improvising.
We have three branches that share instructors.
Each branch is its own unit with its own timetable, rooms and roster, while the centre's management sees all three. An instructor teaching across branches appears in each timetable without being double-booked, and their total hours consolidate for pay rather than being added up by hand from three sources.
Our year is spiky — enrolment season is chaos and then it's quiet.
That is the argument for having the record in place before the spike rather than during it. Enrolment season is when enquiries get lost, rooms get double-booked and fee status drifts, precisely because everyone is improvising. Set it up in a quiet period with one process — usually the roster and instructor hours — and add fees and admissions before the next intake.