Get Started for Tutors and Admins 👩🏫
Ayotree will help you manage your students, parents, scheduling, billing, and lets you teach in a virtual classroom. In addition, the system will automate your tasks, such as billing/class reminders, income & expense reports, registrations, and more.
You can set up a school platform to have a student in another country register on your site and log in to the student portal of their native language to schedule bookings, learn through a virtual classroom, and make payments based on their country’s currency.
Overview
Ayotree has a lot of tools for your business, so things can get complicated to set up. We created this guide explicitly designed for an independent teacher in mind.
You will learn how to manage users, schedule courses, enroll students, create an invoice, and set up a couple of web pages so your students or parents can register for an account and log into the system to make a payment.
Then we will cover how parents and students pay their invoices, schedule bookings, launch a virtual classroom, and take attendance. The final steps will show you how to send personalized invoices and email reminders.
There is a lot to unpack, and it may feel overwhelming, but Ayotree is here to help you. Follow this guide, and if you have any questions, email us, or chat with us.
Step 1: Profiles 👩🏫 🧑🎓 👩👦
Creating profiles will you help manage your users. You are creating an account for them with an option to log in to the platform. There are three main profiles types you should initially focus on.
· Teacher
· Student
· Parent
When you sign up for Ayotree, you create an admin profile. The admin profile allows you to have the ability to handle all the administrative tasks (scheduling, user profile management, notifications, invoicing, etc.).
You will also need to create a teacher profile to teach the students.
Teacher 👩🏫
Let’s start by creating a teacher profile for yourself.
When you are ready to teach a class, you will need to log in as a teacher. The teacher will take attendance, teach the lesson, communicate with students/parents, and handle class reports.
The teacher will also review and accept bookings, prepare course materials, and schedule the teaching availability.
To create a teacher.
Go to the Profiles tab > Teacher
Click on the + Add a New Teacher button.
Fill in the required information and select your time zone.
Next, you want to set up your teachers’ availability schedule.
This crucial step will allow the system to know when you can teach and check for any scheduling conflicts. It will not allow students to book a lesson with you outside of your availability or if you are already booked for another lesson.
Student 🧑🎓
Creating a student profile will let the student log into the portal, schedule and book lessons, enter virtual classrooms, review class materials, and pay invoices.
When adding a new student, remember to adjust the student’s time zone, the interface’s language, and login information.
Time Zone and Language of Interface
· It is essential to adjust the time zone for the scheduling to work correctly.
· Changing the language interface will allow the student to log into the system with the selected language.
Login Information
Activate the login status and fill out the info to allow the student to log into the portal.
Parents 👩👦
If your student is very young, you can create a parent profile; it will allow the parent to manage all of their kid(s) scheduling, billing, and communications between the teachers in one place.
Once you link the parent with the students, the linked students will not have access to billing and scheduling.
· Make sure the time zone and language of interface is updated for the parents
· Once you create the parent, you can go to the children’s tab to link the accounts together
Step 2: Scheduling Courses 📅
This step will show you how to schedule offline and online classes.
Creating a course will help schedule time with your student, set up how you want to charge them, and view historical activity.
First, you can start creating courses by going to the Scheduling Tab > Courses > Courses List
Click on +Add a new course.
Click on the +add a new course button.
Enter your course information.
Tip: Check Enable virtual classroom to teach online
· Choose and test the virtual classrooms to see which one best fits your needs.
· Ayotree virtual classroom and Zoom are known to have the best connections globally.
· Chrome browsers are highly recommended for all virtual classrooms
Set your schedule type depending on how much you want to charge them for their lessons.
Below are the two most popular scheduling types.
Scheduling Types Scenarios
1. Booking (1 on 1 )
2. Set (1 on 1 or Group)
1. Booking
The booking schedule type is designed for teaching a private 1 on 1 lesson. It lets the parent or student book and choose the time. They can log into the platform and schedule the bookings themselves. Your teaching availability schedule will determine when they can book.
Standard Configuration below:
Scheduling Type: Booking
Booking type: Teacher Availability
Helpful Tips Below
· Create one course for each private student
· After creating the first course, you can easily clone the course and schedule classes for another student
Also, go to the Tools tab >Settings to review additional booking schedule rules to suit your needs
2. Set
If you want to set the time for the private or Group lesson, choose this option.
The set schedule type is designed for both private and group classes. This option allows you to determine when to teach the lesson by setting your class schedule.
Then, once the student is enrolled, they can show up to class without booking. The weekly schedule stays the same week to week. (i.e., Conversational English every Tuesday at 5 pm.)
Once you fill in the information, click on the Add Teacher button, and see the scheduling option below.
Complete the scheduling and assign yourself as the teacher.
Note: After you hit the save button, the system will check against the teacher’s availability schedule and notify you of a time conflict.
Let’s start with creating just one course for now and move on to the next step.
Step 3: Enrollment 📚
Now that you created a course, the next step allows you to enroll a student into the course. Finally, you will be adding a student to the course and sending them an invoice.
Enroll
Follow the steps below to enroll the students.
Scheduling > Courses > Course List > Click the more button of the course you want to enroll for the student > Enroll Student button.
Enrolling a student will also create an invoice. Ayotree offers several different ways for you to invoice a student.
There are 3 enrollment types for you to choose from. It depends on how you want to charge your student.
· Lessons
· Hours
· Tuition
Lessons
Lessons are the most popular enrollment type option for a booking schedule. It is a type of credit system that allows you to charge the student for each lesson.
The example below shows an invoice setup to charge $100 for 10 lesson credits. The lesson credits will expire within 1 year of the start date.
Hours
The other type of credit system is hours. Choose hours if you want to charge based on the length of the lesson. For example, if you charge $100 per hour and the student’s lesson is 30 minutes, the student will be charged $50.
Tuition
The tuition option charges the students a flat rate (one time or monthly), regardless of whether they have one lesson scheduled or five, and is widely used with a set schedule.
Once you select the enrollment type, choose One Time Payment and complete the standard invoice fees section. Save.
Sending the invoice
After completing the invoice section, you can send an invoice by adding the student.
Click +Add Student or Existing Students.
If you are teaching privately, add one student per course.
If you are teaching a group class (set), you can add multiple students to the course. The system will generate a separate invoice for each student. The student or parent will receive the invoice through the portal, and you also have the option of emailing the invoice.
Email Documents
You can automatically email the documents to the students after they enroll by checking the boxes under the email documents section. Once you hit the save button, it will immediately send a PDF invoice and/or a contract to the student or parent. We will discuss more the email section later.
Allow students and parents to purchase additional lessons on their own
If you charge by the lesson/hour and enroll them into the course, you can allow the student or parent to log into the portal and purchase additional lessons themselves.
To do that, go to the scheduled course list, edit the specific course, and enable allow users to buy lesson credits under course information.
The next step is to add your pricing. Then, you can create your lesson packages for them to purchase after the student is enrolled.
Step 4: Web Portals and Payment Setup 📝💳
Completing this step will allow parents or students to register for an account, log into your platform, and pay their invoices.
First, look at the school information to make sure your school and campus information is ideal.
School Information
Set up your school name and URLs.
Your unique school URL is used for logging into the system for you and your users (students and parents).
Under Tools and School Information, you can change your school name and URL*.
You can also edit your campus information.
Edit your campus name (School Name) and logo information (which will appear on the registration portal).
For the next step, let’s design the look and feel of the user portals.
There are 2 types of portals
1. Registration Form Portal
2. Login Portal
Registration Form Portal
You can customize the look and feel of your registration form. Filling out this form will create CRM student inquiry account for the user and redirect them to the student or parent portal. Once inside, they can chat with you and pay an invoice.
If the parent is filling out the form, they will have access to the account. You will give the student’s login info to the parent.
Registration Form
Go through each setting option to suit your school. Be sure to adjust these 4 setting options below for the best results.
1. Descriptions
2. Review Show/Hide
3. Status (turn Active when ready)
4. Terms and Conditioning
The show and hide section allow you to customize your registration page. If you want to display a field, then turn on the field. If you’re going to make the field a requirement to register, you will need to turn on both fields (I.e., Gender and Gender*).
After completing the form and pressing save, you can copy the registration URL and open it up on another tab to test the new registration page.
Terms and Conditions
Tip: You can create the terms and conditions in a Google doc and link it to the terms and conditions.
Registration Logo
Add your school logo and edit your school name if needed.
Login Portal
Next, we will create a web portal for yourself, students, and parents to log in. They will log in through your school’s URL.
Go to the website builder to start customizing your login portal. Click on the template menu on the upper left panel to select Login Template and save.
Click on the customize menu to customize your login info.
Next, adjust your settings and add your logo and background image.
You can quickly preview how your website looks like by clicking on the visit homepage button below.
Payment Settings
This section will show you how to integrate a payment gateway (payment processor) into Ayotree. It will allow you to accept online payments.
Ayotree connects more than 12 different payment processors to accept payments from most countries in the world.
Choose a payment processor. We recommend that you do your research to determine what works best for you. Ayotree does not take any transaction fees. You will be paying separate fees to your payment processor.
Stripe and PayPal are the most popular payment processors for tutors in our system.
Note: You have the option to accept payments outside of your online payment processor. Also, you can manually accept payments (i.e., cash or checks).
Once you decide which payment processor works for you,
Go to Finances > Billing > Payment Settings and select Inactive Gateways to see the list of available gateways.
Select your payment gateway provider
To find the necessary information from your payment provider, you can google the payment provider’s name and the required field names. However, it is recommended that you first look for help at the payment provider’s support site before looking at any 3rd party as they tend to have the most up-to-date information.
Example:
Paypal = type in the search bar “PayPal Client ID and Secret.”
Stripe = type in the search bar “Stripe publishable key and secret key.”
Contact support@ayotree.com for additional payment options.
Setup Complete
Go to Get Started for Tutors Part 2 for the next step!
Additional Resource
If you need any help, please contact support.