How to Automate CounselMore

The practice is forty students and one application season

CounselMore is college planning software for the people who walk a student through applying: independent educational consultants, established counseling practices, high school counseling departments and non-profit advocacy programs. What it holds is a caseload. Each student carries a profile, a college list, an application tracker, a folder of documents and a running record of hours.

In most of these practices the counselor is the whole business. They meet the family, build the list, set the assignments, read the essays, invoice for the time, and answer the message on a Sunday evening asking whether an early deadline has moved.

The company is unusually direct about what it does with what it holds. Its own data commitment says student outcomes, profiles and application histories are not for sale and do not feed its models, which is not a small thing when the records are about somebody's sixteen-year-old.

The counseling is the part of the week that gets squeezed

Ask a counselor what actually filled last week and very little of the answer is counseling.

It went on chasing. The teacher who agreed in June to write a recommendation and has not submitted it. The student whose supplemental essay document has not changed in eleven days. The family whose prepaid hours ran out three sessions ago and who has not been told. The parent who forwarded a scholarship page at midnight and wants to know whether it fits their daughter.

The rest went on checking. Every college on a senior's list publishes its own dates and its own requirements, on its own site, in its own layout, and changes them when it suits. By October that is eleven students, each with a dozen or more schools, and one person expected to notice when any of those pages moved.

CounselMore

Monday's list of who has stalled Essay documents and portal activity checked across the whole caseload, so the student who has written nothing in a fortnight surfaces in October.

A changed date caught on the college's own page Each school on each list read where it is actually published, so a moved deadline reaches the tracker the week it moves.

The hours conversation raised early Prepaid balances that have run down written up as a draft note to the family before the next session rather than after it.

CounselMore already tracks every school and every requirement

The platform does far more of this than a spreadsheet and a shared calendar ever did, and a practice not using the tracking side is working harder than it has to.

The Application Tracker is the centre of it, built to show every school and every requirement for a student, with status columns, deadlines and the counselor's notes against each campus. The Routines Manager pushes curriculum assignments out on a schedule, releases them on a set date and stacks reminders behind them. The College List Builder works from a wide set of campus attributes, and outcomes are recorded as admit, waitlist, defer or deny, so a practice can see its own history across cohorts. Time tracking runs on a stopwatch, prepaid hours count down, and Stripe takes the payment. Students and parents each get their own portal, and document folders sync both ways with Google Drive.

All of that acts on what somebody typed in, or on a system CounselMore has been connected to. A college's own admissions page is neither. Nor is the applicant portal each university runs, the scholarship page a parent found, the recommendation a teacher has not filed, or the shared essay document that has been open and untouched since half term.

Every school on the list gets checked before Monday

A week's worth of that checking can be finished before the first session of the week begins.

Each college on each senior's list checked against what that college currently publishes, so a changed date or a changed requirement reaches the tracker in the week it changed rather than the week it bites. Scholarship and honors program deadlines pulled off those same pages and set against the students they actually fit. The recommender who still has not filed chased with a note already drafted in your voice, waiting for you to decide whether it goes.

Every senior's essay documents watched for movement, so the student who has written nothing for a fortnight appears on Monday's list instead of in December. A weekly picture of the caseload: what moved, what did not, and who has not opened their portal since the summer. Prepaid balances written up before the next session rather than after it. A new enquiry from a family answered with your real availability already checked against the calendar.

Reading, watching and drafting run unattended. Nothing is submitted for a student, nothing goes to a college or a family, and nothing is entered on a student's behalf until the counselor has read it and sent it.

A deadline can be fetched, a decision cannot

Every hour spent refreshing admissions pages is an hour not spent with the seventeen-year-old who is frightened of all of it.

WebRun is an agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens CounselMore beside the college sites, the shared documents and your inbox, reads what each one shows, and gives back the chase list, the weekly digest or the note to a family already written.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be held to a named list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it.

Every workflow below says what it opens before it runs.