How to Automate Teachworks

Teachworks is the timetable a tutoring business runs on

Teachworks is management software for education businesses that sell time: tutoring centres, test prep, music schools, language schools, driving instructors, coding and arts programmes.

A business like that is a timetable with money attached. Every hour of every teacher is either sold or it is not, half the families are partway through a block of hours they already paid for, and the whole thing rearranges itself every time a child catches a cold.

So Teachworks holds the calendar, the student and family records, teacher availability, the invoices, the packages of hours, and the wages owed to whoever taught the lesson. For a centre with fifteen tutors it is not one system among several. It is the answer to almost every question anybody asks during the day.

What it holds is what happens in the lesson. The money once it has left, the families who quietly stopped booking, and the school calendar that decides your whole timetable are all somewhere else.

The admin arrives one lesson at a time

The work around a tutoring business is never one big job. It is a hundred small ones, each attached to a single lesson.

A student cancels on Wednesday, so somebody hunts for a makeup slot with the same teacher. A family's package drops to two hours left, so somebody has to notice and ask whether they want to top up. A card declines at the end of the month, so somebody works out which lessons were already taught against it. A teacher has not confirmed next week, so somebody sends the third message. Somebody checks whether the Tuesday group class has enough students to run.

In the office it is the same shape at a larger scale: exporting a term of lessons to check the numbers, copying the families who did not come back into an email tool, matching what Stripe paid out against what the invoices said.

Almost all of it is opening one screen and comparing it with another.

Teachworks

Package hours before they run out A family offered a top-up while there are still lessons left to book, rather than after the last one is used.

Payouts matched to invoices What Stripe actually deposited compared with what was billed, weekly, while a gap is still explainable.

Classes that will not run Group sessions counted against the head count each one needs, with time left to fill it or move a student.

Invoice Autopilot and lesson reminders already run themselves

Teachworks automates more of this than most centres switch on, and the add-ons are where it lives.

Automated lesson reminders reach students, parents and teachers before a lesson, with the wording and the lead time set per type of recipient, and SMS Lesson Reminders send the same thing to a phone. The Invoice Autopilot add-on generates invoices automatically on a schedule you choose. The Automatic Allocation add-on applies payments and credit notes to invoices without anyone matching them by hand. The Conflict Validator add-on runs the conflict checker every time a lesson is scheduled, which is the difference between catching a double booking now and catching it on Saturday morning. The Website Booking Plugin lets a family book a lesson, join an open class or enrol in a course from your own site at any hour.

That is a serious amount of automation, and all of it operates on lessons, students and invoices inside Teachworks.

It stops at the login screen. The bank is elsewhere. The payout report from the payment processor is elsewhere. So is the exam board, the local school term calendar, and the mailing list holding every family who ever enquired.

Lapsed families and half-full classes are a list, not a mystery

A tutoring centre's hardest questions all have answers on somebody's website, behind a password it already holds.

Packages running down, so a family with two hours left is offered a top-up before the last lesson rather than after it. Payments that failed at Stripe matched back to the lessons already taught against them, so nobody teaches a fourth hour for free. What a payout actually deposited set against what the invoices said, weekly, while a difference is still one week wide.

Teachers who have not confirmed next week, checked against the timetable and their own calendar, on Friday rather than on Monday. Group classes counted against the head count each needs to be worth running, with a week left to move somebody or promote it.

Families who stopped booking after March, listed with what they last studied and which teacher they had, which for a tutoring centre is the most valuable list in the building. Term dates published by the local schools, read from their own pages, because half your timetable moves when they do.

Keep the family contact supervised. A tutoring centre lives on word of mouth between parents who know each other, and one wrongly aimed message about an unpaid invoice travels through a class WhatsApp group in an afternoon.

Nobody trained as a tutor to reconcile Stripe

The teaching is the business. The judgement about a struggling student is the business. Comparing a payout report against an invoice list is neither, and it is what fills the hour after the last lesson finishes.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Teachworks, Stripe, the bank or the mailing tool, reads each one, and puts the comparison in front of you with the differences named.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. Anything going to a family is drafted and waits for a person to send it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.