Getting Started: Fast Track to Success - Ayotree: Cloud-Based School Management Software

Complete these 5 steps and you will have a powerful system to help you efficiently manage your school.

Setting up a school management system might appear overwhelming but it can be done in 5 steps. The process is similar to training your new hire (virtual assistant) to help you with a variety of tasks.

Take a look at the 5 step overview and analogy below.

Step 1: Profiles

Let’s start off creating profiles for your staff members so they can gain access to the system.

1. Administrators (optional)

2. Teachers (import via excel available)

Step 2: Courses

Before you create your course, you want to set up your teachers’ availability schedule. This important step will ensure the teacher is available to the assigned course.

Now, you can start creating courses by going to the Scheduling Tab > Courses > Courses List and click on the “+Add a new course“

Enter your course information. (Categories are customizable. See additional category settings in step 4.)

Set your schedule type accordingly.

Let’s take a quick look at the four scheduling types in detail.

4 Scheduling Types Scenarios

1. Set – The schedule and teachers are fixed for a period of time.

Scenario 1 – Teacher Jane teaches music 101 every week on Mondays and Tuesdays for 10 weeks.

2. Booking – Students can look at the teachers’ available schedule and book a time with a teacher.

Scenario 2 – A student books a private one on one lesson with a teacher.

3. Flexible Teacher – The schedule is fixed and each week the teacher could be different.

Scenario 3 – A Yoga school teaching Beginning Yoga 5 days a week for 5 weeks. They have 8 teachers in rotation to teach the beginners class. The student pays one tuition of 400.

4. Flexible Student – Based on a set schedule. The student can choose to attend or not attend the lesson.

Scenario 4 – A yoga school offers 12 different classes every day of the week. Any student can choose and join any class.

Once you finish your settings, click on the add Schedule button and you will see the scheduling option below.

Note: After your hit save, the system will check against the teacher’s availability schedule and will notify you if the teacher is unavailable.

And that is how you add a course. Let’s start off with creating just one course for now and move on to the next step.

Step 3: Branding

You can customize the look and feel of your school’s online portal.

First, take a look at the school information to make sure your school and campus information is ideal.

School Information

Set up your school name and URLs.

Under Tools and School Information, you can change your school name and URL*.

Your unique school URL is used for nonprimary admin/students/parents/staff to log into the system. As the primary admin, you can use both ayotree.com or your school URL to log in.

*See custom services if you would like to remove ayotree.com from the URL.

You can also edit your campus information.

Edit your campus name and logo information (which will appear on the registration portal).
Edit/add your classrooms

For the next step, let’s design the look and feel of the user portals.

There are 2 types of portals

Registration Portal

Below is an example of a webpage where students/parents can register

Login Portal

Here is another example of a webpage that allows students, teachers, & staff to log in.

Registration Portal

You can customize the look and feel of your registration form.

There are three sections to customize.

Registration Form

Go to tools > settings and click on the registration form tab

Go through each setting option to suit your school. Be sure to adjust these 5 setting options below for the best results.

Page Favicon
Descriptions
Background Image
Attach terms & conditions
Status (turn Active when ready)

Tip: You can add your terms and conditions (URL link) on the attach terms & conditions section.

Registration Logo

Add your school logo and edit your school name if needed.

To add your logo, go to tools > school information > campus and click edit to see upload logo.

Registration Forms Fields

You can also adjust the registration inquiries under Tools > Settings > Tools

Login Portal

Next, we are going to create a custom portal for your students/parents and staff to log in.

Go to the website builder to start customizing your login portal.

Under the website builder page, you will see the HTML code and Logo. Below are some helpful tips.

Tip # 1

Logo – Getting the right size can be a bit tricky. Here are some resizing methods:

– Logo Size under 200 x 200 dpi works best

– Adjust Logo Size on the right side
– Upload a different logo size

Tip # 2

HTML Code – If you like your portal linked to your website, provide your HTML code to your web developer.

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.

Step 4: Workflows

It’s time for you to configure the settings in order to run your school the way you like. This is similar to giving rules to your virtual assistant on how to operate and represent your school.

Under this step, we will cover:

Settings – review scheduling and permissions types
Documents – creating important documents
Email templates and automated rules – set email rules for all profile types
Payments settings – adding a payment gateway system

Settings

When reviewing the settings, there are two key sections to cover.

1. Scheduling – This section plays an important role. It has many permission settings and scheduling rules. It is recommended to go through each setting option to make sure it aligns with your business model.

Below are some examples:

Only allow paid students to enter the virtual classroom by using the disable VC room on pending invoices function

Turn on public access for your school calendar.

Allow teachers to add students to the attendance roster

2. Course Categories

This setting allows you to quickly edit your course categories.

By default, you will notice 70 categories of languages. If this doesn’t apply to you, you can easily select and delete all. With a fresh view, you can create your own categories.

Documents

You can create your own documents(contracts/invoices/etc) and personalize the emails. Once a student performs an action, an automated email is sent out.

Take a look at an example.

Below are the key components of a typical enrollment workflow.

(1)After a student enrolls, (2)an automated email with the contract and invoice is sent out.

(3)Once the student pays for the class,(4) another automated email is sent out confirming the payment.

(5) 2 hours before class starts (timing is adjustable), the student will receive an automated class reminder email.

As you can see above, this is just an example of a workflow. You can adjust the workflow to fit your needs.

2 Key Documents

Below are two important templates critical for most schools.

Enrollment Contract = once a student enrolls in a course, a contract can automatically email the student.

Enrollment Invoice = automatically email an enrollment invoice notification after the student enrolls.

Once you are in the edit contract template section, you will be able to customize your own template. These templates are personable with a short code function.

Short Codes

The short codes allow you to quickly personalize the emails. The short code will insert the owner’s information into the template.

To see the full list of short codes to reference, click on the short code link shown below.

Customized Emails and Set Email Automation Rules

Under the email template section, there are 5 different email types based on user roles.

If you want your emails automated, it is highly recommended to visit each view of the roles that are applicable to your school and look through all of the available email templates. If your school does not deal with parents or companies, then skip those views.

Below is a snapshot of email templates under the student’s view. Go through each email template by clicking on the edit button. Once you created the email, remember to activate the automation rule by checking the on box.

Some of the most popular and recommended automated features include:

New Login and Password = you should this on for all roles (students/teachers/admins/parents) that apply to your school. When a new profile is created, Ayotree will automatically email the login info to the new user.

Email reminder before a lesson starts = send an email x hours before the start date. You can adjust the setting at setting.

Paid Payment = notify the student that payment has been processed.

Payment Settings

Connect your payment gateway. Ayotree works with PalPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and other popular regional services.

To find the necessary information from your payment provider, you can google the payment provider’s name and the required field names. 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.

Step 5: Enrollment

Now that your school is set up, we can start the enrollment setup process.

You have the option of manually enrolling the students or have them go to your portal and register themselves.

Manual Enroll

Follow the steps below to have the admin 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.

Invoice Options

There are 3 main invoice options.

One Time Payment – student pays once for the course
Pay As You Go – student continues to pay until the student ends the course
Billing Cycle – student can make multiple payments for the course

One Time Payment – Generate the invoice for the entire cost of the course. Pay one time only.

Scenario 1 – A student pays once for the course.

Pay As You Go – Does not have a definite end and generates invoices for a specific amount in which a student pays for the costs/lessons of a course when they occur rather than before or afterward.

Scenario 2 – A student gets billed every 2 weeks for the course. The course does not have an end date. The student continues to pay until the student chooses not to continue.

It has 2 options.

New Invoice After Paid: Every time the user pays for their invoice, the system will automatically generate a new invoice with the same fee amount and lesson the admin had initially set for the enrollment.

Cycle: The system will generate the invoice regardless if the student has paid their invoice or not.

1. Max Hours/Lessons: Limited to the maximum number of lessons for each week. For example: if the max is set at 5 and the student already used 3 lessons last week, then next week the invoice will charge for 3 lessons since there are still 2 remaining unused lessons from last week.

2. Continuous: Generate invoices for a specific amount in which the student pays for the lessons of a course when they occur rather than before or afterward. Each week, the system will generate the same amount of lessons/hours for each invoice.

Billing Cycle – has a definite enrollment end date and invoices are automatically generated either weekly or monthly.

Scenario 3 – The student can make multiple payments for the course.

You can automatically email the documents to the students once they enroll by checking the boxes under the email documents section (shown below)

Self Enroll

To have the students enroll themselves, go to advertise courses under the scheduling tab.

In the Advertise Courses section, you can add a new course or add an existing course.

The advantage of creating a new course under the advertise course is having the option to require students to pay for a class before the course starts.

Once the course has been added, the student will see the course catalog appear on the menu tab where they can self enroll.