Advertising plays an important role in running and growing a tutoring business, so the ability to create effective, compelling ads is an important skill to develop. This blog post looks at several guidelines to follow when designing your tutoring ads to ensure that they are compelling and effective.
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We’ve made the following improvements and fixes to TutorPanel during April.
- The “Add Lesson” link was displaying in the calendar sidebar for tutors that did not have the permission to add lessons enabled in their profiles. We’ve fixed this so only tutors with permission to add lessons can access this link.
- Added “Wage Tiers” for managing more complex wage structures where wages are dependent on both the type of tutoring and the tutor’s level. Instructions can be found here: Wage Tiers
- For students that are billed using the “Prepaid Package” option, teachers are only able to add lessons for types of tutoring for which the student has purchased packages. This prevents tutors from inadvertently choosing the wrong type of tutoring.
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An important aspect of managing your tutoring business is tutor management. Tutor management refers specifically to the administrative tasks associated with managing your tutors and TutorPanel contains features that act as a tutor management system. In this post we’ll look at several of the features that TutorPanel includes to help make managing your tutors easier. Read the rest of this entry »
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At TutorPanel we continually work on improving our tutoring software based on feedback we receive from customers. A recently added feature that may help your business track your tutor’s wages is a different wage tracking method called “Wage Tiers”. Originally, TutorPanel had a simple method for tracking tutor wages. You could either pay your tutors their wages based on the type of tutoring they were providing to the student or you could set a flat hourly rate regardless of tutoring type. While these methods are sufficient for many small tutoring businesses, some tutoring companies wanted the ability to pay tutors different wages for different types of tutoring based on the tutor’s experience, education level, etc.
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When starting a tutoring business it’s important to find an attractive niche to establish your company. Finding the right niche is important for your new business because it allows you to avoid competing head on with more established tutoring companies and will allow your tutoring business to earn higher profit margins in the early stages. These higher profit margins are essential for funding the expansion of your tutoring business.
Tutoring is a competitive business where word-of-mouth and reputation play an important role in attracting students. For a brand new business to compete directly with established tutoring companies it would likely need to spend more on advertising to get the same number of students since established businesses can rely on word of mouth for attracting new students. As a result, if a new tutoring business charges the same rate as established tutoring companies it will likely generate less profit because advertising expenses are higher on a relative basis. This puts the new business at a disadvantage right from the start.
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In March we made the following enhancements to TutorPanel
- Fixed some date fields that weren’t reflecting the correct timezone.
- When adding, editing or reconciling events from the calendar, after the form is saved browser will return to the same date. This is useful when making changes to events in the future so you don’t have to navigate back to the date after the event is saved.
- Added a “Subjects” field to the tutor’s profile in tutor accounts
- Teacher colors were not displaying correctly in Internet Explorer, but now they are.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the “Pay Online” button on some invoices to cause an error from PayPal if the amount had more than two decimal places.
- Updated the Teacher Agenda report so that all teachers can be displayed and printed in a single report.
- Fixed a bug in the bulk student upload that was occurring if the csv file was created on a Mac.
- Changed the account balances table so that only active accounts or accounts with non-zero balances are displayed.
- Added a feature that lets you delete all the events on a single date. This feature is useful for clearing all the events on holidays or when your office is closed. In the month view of the calendar hover over the arrow next to the date number and then click the link to delete the events.
- The iCalendar feed was not working for companies in the Eastern Hemisphere – we’ve fixed this.
- The “Cash Basis” income statement is now displaying the tutor wage expense correctly.
- Added an “All Teachers” option to the timesheet report so that all teachers’ hours can be displayed in a single report.
- Added an option to General Settings that will automatically set the wage and cost for cancelled sessions to zero.
- The Daily Summaries report now includes an option to display a full week of daily summaries in one report.
- Updated the students, teachers and staff tables so that by default they are ordered by last name to be consistent with the rest of TutorPanel.
- Added an option to include the session cost in teacher timesheets.
- Fixed the order in the bach reconcile for group lessons.
- Fixed a bug that was setting the tutor wage in sessions reconciled as “Missed” in tutor accounts to zero. Now these sessions will keep the original wage and can be adjusted by the admin if necessary.
- Cancelled sessions are no longer displayed in Daily Summary reports.
- Fixed a bug that was causing Student and Employee tables to preven the drop-down menus in the navigation bar from appearing.
- Income statement was switching to the next month when the month changed in Greenwich Mean Time, which was too early for users in other timezones. This has been fixed.
- Removed the “Add Lesson” link from the calendar page in tutor’s accounts that only have permission to edit lessons.
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We’ve added several new features to TutorPanel this month and fixed some bugs. One major feature that several users have requested is the ability to sync the TutorPanel calendar with other calendars such as Google Calendar. We’ve added this feature which allows administrators and teachers to export their calendars as an icalendar feed which can easily be added to several popular calendar programs including Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Yahoo Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird and more. You can find instructions for setting up sync in this Knowledge Center article: Calendar Sync Instructions.
We’ve also added a new view to the calendar called “Teacher View”. This view displays each teacher in a column with their own events displayed below their name. This is a great way for quickly finding openings in a teacher’s schedule.
Other changes:
- Added Singapore Dollars and United Arab Emirates dirhams to the list of supported currencies.
- When exporting teacher hours to excel the file was not including lessons with the status “Missed” – this has been fixed.
- Added an “Export to Excel” option to the calendar page for exporting all lessons (past and future) from the calendar.
- Added an option to display students in the Teacher Timesheet report.
- The financial snapshot on the admin home page was displaying the incorrect amount in the “Two Months Ago” category and is now working correctly.
- Fixed a bug in Internet Explorer affecting downloading from SSL connections wasn’t allowing files to be downloaded from the file area.
- Added a feature that puts your company email address in the “From” field instead of TutorPanel’s address.
- Internet Explorer wasn’t displaying check marks on attended sessions for a few days due to changes related to the new teacher view in the calendar.
- When scheduling initial lessons on the add student form, wages set in the tutor’s profile were not being picked up if the tutoring price was set to zero. This has been fixed.
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We’ve made several new feature additions to TutorPanel this month as well as a few bug fixes. Below is a list of all of the changes made. You can also get instant updates by following us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tutorpanel.
- Added the ability for teachers to delete their own lessons if they have this permission enabled in their profile.
- Added a teacher view to the calendar that displays all teachers side by side in columns with their own tutoring sessions. This is a great way to quickly see which tutors are available at a specific time and date.
- Added a status field to teacher profiles to allow teachers that are no longer with a company to be hidden from the teacher list when adding lessons and to hide from the main teacher list. Inactive teachers can be viewed by choosing the inactive option in the table filter.
- Secondary guardians can now receive lesson reminders. This can be enabled in the guardian’s profile.
- Added “Subjects” field to the csv export file for teachers.
- Added a printer-friendly format to the Sessions Report, which can be found under the Reports tab
- Added a “Prospect” stauts to student profiles so that information can be stored for prospective students.
- Parent status can be set to active or inactive. Inactive parent’s won’t appear in the parent menu when adding new students, making it easier to find the correct parent.
- Tutor’s can now receive lesson reminders sent to their email address. This can be enabled on the tutor’s profile.
- The parent list now displays the home phone number in the table if a mobile phone number is not provided.
- Fixed a bug that was creating more than one parent record if more than one student had the same parent.
- The student table now displays multiple teachers for students with more than one teacher. Before it only displayed the teacher set as the default in the student’s profile.
- Exporting student records to excel now includes custom field values if present.
- Prepaid sessions are now included in tracking wage payments for invoiced and paid sessions.
- Added a checkbox to the reconcile form for confirming to send lesson notes. This allows administrators to review tutor’s notes before sending them to the client or allows changes to be made to a reconciled lesson without resending the notes. Client account must still have lesson notes enabled in their profile.
- The teacher table was loading slowly for about a day and was fixed.
- Added a “Subjects” field to teacher profiles and the teacher table.
- Information pop-ups were partially hidden at times depending on where the event was appearing on the calendar – this has been fixed.
- Passwords are no longer included in welcome emails. Usernames are included as well as a link to the reset password page where new users can generate a temporary password for logging in.
- Added the option to exclude invoices with zero balances for automatically generated invoices.
- Parent and student accounts being billed using the “tutoring package” method now display remaining hours under the billing tab so that they can keep track of how many hours are remaining.
- Fixed a bug that was causing the logout redirect to work incorrectly if “http://” was added to the beginning of your url. This now works with or without http://
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Most small tutoring businesses rely on PayPal for processing credit card payments while larger companies typically use a payment gateway along with a merchant account for credit card processing; however, there is a new tool available to tutoring companies of all sizes that lets you process credit cards in person – all you need is an iPhone or Android smartphone and a free credit card reader.
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We hope you’ve been enjoying the Christmas holidays have a happy new year in 2012. During December we made some improvements and fixed some bugs in the program. We also began work on some new features that will be finished in January.
Here’s a summary of the updates made in December
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- Tutoring Business
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