👑 Super Admin — School Owner

The Super Admin Guide

You own the school. This guide takes you from creating your account to a fully configured academy that your Admin team, teachers, students and parents can use every day. Follow the sections in order — the setup sequence matters.

Your role at a glance

Spoteca has six account types. As Super Admin you hold the keys: school-level settings, curriculum, pricing, admin accounts, billing and analytics. Day-to-day operations (enrolling, scheduling, collecting payments) live in the Admin view — which you can also access at any time.

Role	Who it's for	What they can do
👑 Super Admin	School owner / director	Everything: curriculum, pricing plans, school settings, admin accounts, billing, analytics, import/export, audit log — plus the full Admin view.
🗂️ Admin	Front-desk / operations staff	Teachers, students, enrollments, schedule, rooms, payments, attendance, messages, announcements. Cannot change school-level settings.
🎹 Teacher	Your instructors	Own schedule & availability, their students, lesson notes, curriculum progress tracking, their pay summary.
🎓 Student	Learners	Their schedule, journey/progress, attendance, payments, notes and messages.
👨‍👩‍👧 Guardian	Parents	A dedicated portal tracking their child: schedule, attendance, journey, payments, messaging the school.
🛠️ Platform Admin	Spoteca staff	Platform-level support (not part of your school).

1 · Create your school

Go to spoteca.com/signup. Signup takes two short steps and about two minutes. No credit card is required.

Step 1 — School info

School Name — your academy's public name (e.g. Harmony Music Academy).

School URL — auto-generated from the name; this becomes your private portal address: spoteca.com/school/yourname. Keep it short — it's what your teachers, students and parents will use to log in. You can edit it before submitting.

Location & contact — address (with Google search assist), country, region, city, phone, and the school email (required — used for billing and important notices).

Step 2 — Your owner account

Your full name, a username (this is what you'll sign in with — not your email), and a password (min. 8 characters). Click Launch My School → and you're signed in automatically, landing on your Super Admin dashboard.

💡 Free vs GrowthSigning up from the Free card gives you the Free plan — every feature, up to 10 active enrollments, forever. Signing up from the Growth card starts a 30-day free trial with unlimited enrollments ($1 per active enrollment/month after, capped at $100/month per branch). You can upgrade any time — see Billing.

2 · Finish setting up your school

The moment signup drops you on your dashboard, a setup wizard opens by itself. It is the shortest route from an empty school to one that can actually enrol a student, and it asks for exactly four things.

Everything happens inside the wizard. Each step shows the real form — the same plan builder, subject list, teacher form and availability grid you'd find in the menus — so you are never sent off to another screen and left to find your way back.

💡 Set your language firstAbove step 1 sits Your school's language — English, French or Arabic. This is what everyone at your school sees, and it is worth setting before you type anything, because it changes the interface immediately. Each person can still switch their own language later from the selector in their top bar.

The order is a dependency chain, not a ranking

You cannot reshuffle these. Each step exists because the next one is impossible without it:

#	Step	Why it can't be skipped
1	Pricing plan	Nothing can be enrolled without one. Plans decide what each family is invoiced and what each teacher is paid — Spoteca generates both automatically.
2	Subjects	Your list starts empty, and adding a teacher asks which subjects they teach. Until this is filled in there is literally nothing to pick, so teachers cannot come first.
3	First teacher	Every lesson belongs to a teacher. They get their own login and their own schedule.
4	Availability	The scheduler only offers slots a teacher is free for. Without this, enrolment shows an empty slot list.

Create a pricing plan

The full plan builder, rendered inline. One plan is enough to start — you can add the rest later from School Settings → Pricing Plans. For what every billing model means, see Section 4.

List the subjects you teach

Piano, guitar, ballet, karate — whatever your school offers. Type each one and press its Save; this list is what the teacher form, enrolment and the waiting list all read from.

Add your first teacher

Name, username and password, phone, photo and the subjects they teach. Their pay is worked out from whichever plan each student is on, so you don't set a per-lesson rate here unless the teacher is on a salary.

Teaching the lessons yourself? You don't need a second account or a second email address — Spoteca can attach a teacher profile to your own owner account — see section 8.

Make your teachers bookable

Paint the hours your school is open by dragging across the grid. This is a template, not the real schedule.

Underneath, tick the teachers you want those hours copied onto and press Apply hours. This is the step that actually makes your school bookable — everything before it is preparation, and until a teacher has hours of their own, enrolment will offer no slots at all.

Applying adds to a teacher's grid, it never replaces it. Pressing it on a teacher who already keeps their own hours is safe, and pressing it twice does nothing the second time.

⚠️ "Next" does not saveEach step has its own Save button, and nothing is written until you press it. If you type a subject, half-build a plan or paint a grid and then hit Next, Spoteca stops you once with "Not saved yet" and offers Continue without saving. Take the warning seriously — leaving really does discard the change.

Moving around, closing and coming back

The progress bar at the top is clickable: you can jump straight to any step rather than walking through them in order. Back and Next do the obvious, and the last step ends with Finish.

There are three ways out, and they are not the same:

You press	What happens next time you open your dashboard
`✕` or a click outside	The wizard opens by itself again. Use this when you're coming straight back.
`Skip for now`	It stops opening by itself. Your dashboard shows a card instead — "Finish setting up your school — 2 of 4 done" — and `Continue` picks up where you left off.
`Finish` on the last step	The same card, recorded as finished. Note that it records how many steps were actually done, so pressing Finish early is honest about it.

Nothing you have already saved is lost by any of them.

✅ When it disappearsOnce all four are done the wizard stops appearing, and the dashboard card goes with it — a finished school never sees it again. If it has vanished and you still can't enrol anyone, the missing piece is almost always step 4: check that your teachers actually have availability, not just that the school does.

3 · Your dashboard

Your dashboard shows live counters (students, teachers, admins, enrollments, revenue, unpaid payments), your plan status, and recent activity. Need a hand with anything? Tap Ask AI (bottom-right of every page) for instant how-to answers, or follow this guide.

🚀 The setup guide opens on your first visitA short four-step guide appears the first time you land here, walking you through the three things a school needs before it can enrol anyone: a pricing plan, a teacher, and availability. Each step ticks itself off automatically as you complete it — the guide reads your school's real data, so it always shows where you actually stand.

Click Skip for now any time. It becomes a Finish setting up your school card at the top of this dashboard, and you can pick up where you left off. Once all three essentials are done and you click Finish, it disappears for good.

The guide's steps 1 and 2 open the real plan builder and teachers page in a new tab, so nothing is a simplified copy — you're using the same screens described later in this guide. Step 3 lets you paint your school's opening hours without leaving the guide. Step 4 isn't a form at all: it explains the availability rule that traps most new schools — covered in full under School Settings and Switch to the Admin view.

Super admin dashboard — The Super Admin overview.

The sidebar starts with three pinned links: Go to Admin View (the colored button at the very top — jumps straight into your Admin dashboard), Overview, and Broadcast. Below them sit two groups. School Settings holds School Settings (a tabbed page — see below), Billing, Audit Log, Export Data and Import Data. Analytics holds Enrollment Trends, Room Utilization, Teacher Performance, Student Flags and Financial Reports.

The School Settings page itself is a set of tabs that gather everything about how your school is set up in one place: School Profile · Subjects · Rooms · Pricing Plan · Curriculum · Terms · Preferences · Admin Accounts. Wherever this guide says "School Settings → Tab", it means one of these tabs.

4 · Create pricing plans

Sidebar → School Settings → Pricing Plan tab

⚠️ Required before enrolling anyoneYour Admin cannot enroll a single student until at least one pricing plan exists. Do this before handing over to your staff.

A pricing plan bundles everything about how a lesson type is sold: lesson duration, billing style, student price, and what the teacher earns. Clicking New Plan opens a short 3-step wizard where you build your own plan from scratch — you choose the billing model and every detail yourself:

The lesson

Name it (e.g. "Monthly 60min", "8-Session Pack" — students and staff see this name everywhere), pick Individual or Group Class, choose a duration — 15, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 120 minutes — and for individual plans set lessons per week (1–5). Choose 2+ for intensive students: same teacher, and the extra weekly slots are picked at enrollment.

How you charge

Pick one of five billing models:

Billing model	How the student pays	Best for
📅 Recurring	Repeating fee on a billing frequency you pick from a list — Monthly, Quarterly (prepaid), Every 6 months, Yearly, and so on. Choose Fixed price (same amount every period) or Varies (session price × lesson days in the month — months with 5 Mondays cost more than months with 4).	The classic subscription — and prepaid multi-month plans.
🎓 Per Term	One invoice per academic term, using the term dates you define in School Settings → Terms tab. Optionally cap sessions ("up to 15 lessons per term" — unused ones expire).	Conservatories and academies that charge semester tuition.
🎟️ Session Pack	One flat charge for the whole pack of N sessions, paid upfront — never prorated by the calendar month. Auto-renews with a new pack only when the sessions are used up (not monthly).	4/8/10-lesson cards, class passes, tutoring hour packs.
⏱️ Per Lesson	Price per individual session — one invoice for the next lesson at a time, which renews as each is paid.	Drop-in or pay-as-you-go students.
✨ Trial	One-time introductory session; never renews; admin is notified when it's done.	Converting prospects — pair it with your public enrollment link.

Teachers & policies

How is the teacher paid? depends on the billing model you chose:

Recurring & Per Term plans — pick the rate basis: per month (rate × months in the billing period), per billing period / per term (one total for the whole cycle), per scheduled lesson, or per attended lesson (only sessions marked Present count).
Session Pack & Per Lesson plans — set the rate, then use the “Pay teacher per attended session” toggle. ON = the teacher earns the rate each time a session is marked Present on the calendar (added automatically, nothing upfront). OFF = paid per scheduled lesson (Per Lesson) or one flat total for the whole pack (Session Pack).

The rate drives automatic teacher-pay calculation, and for recurring plans the wizard previews the total per period. You can later add per-teacher overrides from the plans list (e.g. your senior piano teacher earns more on the same plan). Also set reschedules allowed per month — how many times a student may move a lesson.

＋

Advanced billing (optional)

Open ⚙️ Advanced Billing to fine-tune: invoice lead days (how many days before the period the invoice is generated — default 7), payment due date, mid-period joiners (prorated by remaining lessons, full price, or free until the next period) and installments (split a term or period fee into 2, 3, 4 or 6 equal payments — the school still issues one invoice for the full fee, with the parts scheduled underneath it). The defaults suit most schools — you never have to touch this.

🛡️ Editing a plan that has students on itChanging the price or structure of a plan with active enrollments doesn't rewrite history — Spoteca archives the old plan and creates a new version. Students already enrolled keep the exact terms they signed up for; new students get the new version.

New pricing plan — The plan wizard — lesson, billing model, price and teacher pay in three steps.

Pricing plans list — Your plans list — create as many as you sell.

💡 Start simpleMost schools launch with two plans: a Monthly plan per duration (30/45/60min) and a Trial plan. Add bundles and group plans once you're comfortable.

5 · School settings & branding

Sidebar → School Settings → School Profile tab

The School Settings page is a set of tabs. The first, School Profile, is where you set your logo (appears on the login portal, dashboards, invoices and receipts — max 2 MB), brand colors, currency (shown on invoices and receipts — USD, EUR, JOD and more), school name/identity and email footer. The other tabs each own one area:

Subjects — the list of subjects your school teaches (starts empty — add your own).
Rooms — your practice rooms and which subjects each is set up for (the same Rooms module as the Admin view).
Pricing Plan — the pricing plans from the previous step.
Curriculum — levels, skills and badges (covered in section 9).
Terms — define your academic terms (e.g. Fall 2026: Sept 7 – Dec 18). Required for Per Term pricing plans: each enrolled student is invoiced once per term, automatically, before the term starts.
School Hours — the hours your school is open, painted on the same weekly grid teachers use. See the note below: these schedule nothing by themselves.
Preferences — school-wide toggles: student reschedule requests, whether teachers see payments, self-enrollment, whether Admins may manage the Subjects list, whether Admins may set teacher availability — and your closed days (holidays no lessons are scheduled on).
Admin Accounts — your staff logins (covered in section 6).

The Rooms tab — the same Rooms module your Admins use, right inside School Settings.

🏫 School Hours — for schools that run fixed hoursIf your school works set hours (say guitar, 4–8pm, Monday to Friday), paint them once under School Settings → School Hours. Nothing is ever scheduled against these hours — they're a template. A teacher (or an admin on their behalf) presses Import school hours and the grid fills in, ready to adjust, instead of starting from a blank week. That import merges — anything already painted stays — and from then on each teacher's own hours are the only thing the scheduler reads. Change the school's hours later and nobody's existing availability is touched; they re-import if they want the new hours.

👥 Letting the office set availabilityBy default your admins can set any teacher's availability from Admin view → Teachers → Availability. That's usually what you want during setup — waiting for every teacher to log in and paint their own week is the single most common reason a new school stalls. Turn it off under Preferences → "Allow Admins to Set Teacher Availability" if only teachers should manage their own. Either way the teacher is notified whenever their hours change, and every change is recorded in the Audit Log.

ℹ️ Subjects are yours to manageThe Subjects tab starts empty — add your own. By default only you can edit it; flip "Allow Admins to Manage Subjects" in the Preferences tab to let your admins edit it too. Admins can also manage Rooms and the reschedule/payment preferences from their own Admin view → Settings — see the Admin guide.

6 · Admin accounts

Sidebar → School Settings → Admin Accounts tab

Create an Admin login for each staff member who runs daily operations. Admins can manage teachers, students, scheduling, payments and communication — but cannot touch curriculum, pricing plans, school settings or billing. If you're an owner-operator, you don't need a separate Admin account: you already have the full Admin view.

7 · Switch to the Admin view

Click the colored Go to Admin View button at the very top of your sidebar to jump into the Admin dashboard — no logout needed. This is where teachers and students are added, so your next steps continue in the Admin guide: add teachers → have them set availability → enroll students.

⚠️ The #1 stall point for new schoolsAfter adding teachers, each teacher must log into their own account and set their availability (Teacher → My Schedule → My Availability) — or you bulk-import it (next section). Until then, no student can be scheduled. If your setup feels "stuck", it's almost always this.

8 · Teaching here yourself

Most schools that start on Spoteca are one person. If you own the school and give the lessons, you do not need a second account.

⚠️ Don't add yourself as a teacherThe + Add Teacher form builds a whole second user, which needs a second email address — Spoteca requires email addresses to be unique — and a second password. You'd end up with two logins and a permanent question about which one you're in. There is a purpose-built alternative.

"I teach here too"

In the setup wizard, above the Add Teacher form on step 3, sits Do you teach here yourself? Pick the subjects you teach and press I teach here too.

This attaches a teacher profile to the account you are already signed into. It asks only for subjects, because your name, phone and photo are already on your account. Your availability, your students and your pay all live on the login you already use.

Switching to your teacher view

Once you teach here, a blue 🎹 My Teacher View button appears in the top right of your Super Admin dashboard, next to your plan badge. It's blue on purpose — teacher things read blue throughout Spoteca, admin things red, billing amber.

Click it and you're in the teacher portal, seeing exactly what your teachers see: your own weekly grid, your students, your lesson notes and your pay. Your top bar keeps a switcher to come back — you have not logged out and you have not lost your Super Admin powers.

In your Super Admin view	In your teacher view
The whole school — every teacher, all revenue, settings and billing.	Only your own lessons, students, notes and pay.
You act as the owner.	You act as one teacher among the others.

✅ It's one account, not twoYou sign in once, with one username and one password. The two views are the same login looking at the school from two angles — nothing is duplicated, and your teacher profile shows up in the teachers list like anyone else's.

If you stop teaching

You can remove your own teacher profile — but not while it is still in use. If you have lessons, students or scheduled sessions attached, Spoteca refuses and tells you to reassign them to another teacher first. That is deliberate: dropping the profile would orphan a live timetable.

9 · Import your existing data (Excel)

Sidebar → School Settings → Import Data

Moving from spreadsheets, My Music Staff, or another system? Import your whole school from Excel files. Each entity has a downloadable template with the exact columns:

Teachers — name, email, phone, subjects, bio.
Students & Guardians — profiles, contacts, parent links, plan & teacher.
Schedules — existing weekly lessons.
Availability — teacher available slots (see below).
Rooms, Calendar, Notes, Messages — everything else.

Do the import in this order: teachers first → create your pricing plans → then students. In the student sheet, Teacher Email and Plan are matched to records that already exist; a value that doesn't match is flagged as a warning in the results and the student still imports (just without that teacher or plan).

🔑 Usernames & passwords are created for youThe teacher and student templates have no username or password columns — Spoteca generates a unique username and a temporary password for every new account. After the import, click Download credentials on the results screen to save a CSV (Name, Username, Email, Temporary Password) to hand out. The temporary password is only shown right after import, so download it before you leave the page.

Migrating students who are partway through a plan

For a brand-new student starting fresh, leave the three columns below blank — they get a normal first invoice, exactly like enrolling them one at a time. For students you're bringing over mid-plan, fill them in so their billing is correct from day one:

Column	What it does
Enrollment Start Date	The date they actually started (sets the billing anchor) — not today's date.
Sessions Used	For session-pack (bundle) plans: how many sessions they've already used, so "sessions left" is right immediately.
Skip First Invoice	Put Yes for students who already paid you elsewhere — the first invoice is recorded as already paid instead of billing them again.

Guardians — contacts by default, logins on request

Guardians are imported as contacts linked to a student (match by Student Username, so import students first). By default a guardian gets no login. To give a parent portal access during the import, put Yes in the Create Login column — Spoteca then generates a username and temporary password for them, shown in the results and included in the Download credentials CSV. Leave it blank for a contact-only guardian. When you export guardians, a Has Login column shows who already has an account.

Fixed school hours? Import availability instead of asking teachers

If your school assigns teachers fixed working hours (e.g. everyone teaches 15:00–20:00), you don't need teachers to paint their own availability. Prepare one sheet with a row per teacher per slot:

Teacher Username	Day	Time
nadia.k	Monday	15:00
nadia.k	Monday	15:15
nadia.k	Monday	15:30
…one row per 15-minute slot, per day, per teacher. Duplicate rows are skipped automatically, so you can re-import safely. You can also identify teachers by Teacher Email instead of username.

Tip: build the sheet in Excel with autofill in minutes — column of 15-minute times, copy per day, copy per teacher. After import, teachers can still fine-tune their own grid.

Import data — The import center — templates for every entity.

💡 Export tooSchool Settings → Export Data downloads your school's data any time. Your data is never locked in.

10 · Set up the curriculum — when you're ready

Sidebar → School Settings → Curriculum tab

ℹ️ This never blocks your launchEnrollment, scheduling and payments all work without a curriculum — set it up whenever you're ready. Until then, student Journey pages simply stay empty.

🎨 Picking iconsDomains and badges can each carry an icon. Click the icon field and choose visually from a searchable set grouped by theme — music, skills, study, achievement, and other disciplines (dance, martial arts, drama, sport, art). The icon then appears beside that domain on every student's Journey page.

The curriculum defines what students learn at your school. It powers each student's Journey page, the teacher's progress-tracking tools, badges, and printable progress reports. It has five building blocks:

Block	What it is	Examples
Levels	Stages on the student journey, optionally per-subject.	Grade 1…8, Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced
Domains	Musicianship areas you track.	Technique, Theory, Aural, Sight-reading, Rhythm, Performance
Skills	Discrete competencies inside a domain, tied to a level and (optionally) an subject.	"Scales & arpeggios for Grade 2", "Read bass clef"
Repertoire	Your school's piece library, by subject and level. Teachers assign pieces to students and track them from Assigned → Learning → Polishing → Performed.	"Für Elise — Beethoven (Grade 3)"
Badges	Milestones awarded manually or automatically by rule.	First practice, 7-day practice streak, 10 pieces performed, 25 skills mastered

The fast way: import a preset

Click one of the preset buttons — ABRSM, RCM, Trinity, or Rockschool — and Spoteca imports a complete graded system (levels, domains, skills and starter badges) in seconds. Everything stays fully editable, and importing twice never duplicates items. Start from the preset closest to how you teach, then rename, delete and add to make it yours.

Curriculum empty — A new school's empty curriculum with preset import options.

Curriculum imported — After importing a preset — levels, domains, skills and badges ready to customise.

Building manually

Levels tab — add each stage ("Grade 1"…). Leave subject blank to apply to all subjects, or create subject-specific levels.
Domains tab — add areas like Technique or Theory (with an optional icon).
Skills tab — add skills inside a domain; optionally pin to a level and subject.
Repertoire tab — add pieces (title, composer, subject, level).
Badges tab — create badges. Rule-based badges award themselves: first practice, practice streak (N days), pieces performed (N), skills mastered (N). Leave the rule empty for manually-awarded badges (e.g. "Grade passed").

🎯 Not a music school?The same structure adapts to any teaching business — belts and katas for martial arts, syllabus units for language schools, techniques for dance. Rename the domains and levels to fit.

11 · Your Spoteca plan & billing

Sidebar → School Settings → Billing

Plan	Cost	Limits
Free	$0 forever	All features, up to 10 active enrollments. No time limit, no card required.
Growth	$1 per active enrollment / month / branch, capped at $100/month	Unlimited enrollments. Starts with a 30-day free trial. Paused or ended enrollments are never billed.

An active enrollment is one student-subject subscription that was active at any point in the billed month. A student taking piano and guitar counts as two enrollments. Your monthly usage snapshot and invoices appear on this page.

Billing — plan status, enrollment count, monthly records.

12 · Analytics & reports

Enrollment Trends Analytics → Enrollment Trends — new sign-ups, dropouts and growth over time.
Financial Reports Analytics → Financial Reports — monthly revenue, teacher payroll totals, expenses and margin. At the top sits a Billing health card: it's green when every due invoice has been generated, and turns amber to list any enrollment, per-term plan or group class whose invoice is still missing — with a Generate now button to create them on the spot. Invoices normally generate automatically on the daily billing run (and back-fill any month a run ever missed), so this is just a safety net you can glance at.
Teacher Performance — lessons delivered, retention and ratings per teacher.
Room Utilization — how busy each room is; spot dead hours and bottlenecks.
Student Flags — Spoteca automatically flags students with overdue payments, recent absences, or no upcoming lessons, so nobody slips through the cracks.

Financial reports — revenue, payroll, margin.

Student flags — your early-warning system.

13 · Broadcast & audit log

Broadcast Sidebar → Broadcast — send an announcement to the whole school, all teachers, or all students at once (holidays, recitals, policy changes). Recipients see it on their dashboard and in notifications.

Audit Log School Settings → Audit Log — every important action (payment marked paid, student created, enrollment removed, setting changed) is recorded with who did it and when. Your accountability layer.

FAQ

What must I finish before my staff can work?

At least one pricing plan — that's the hard requirement. Then add teachers and get availability set. The curriculum can wait: enrollment works without it, but Journey pages stay empty until it exists.

Can I change the portal URL (slug) later?

Contact Spoteca support (hello@spoteca.com) — changing it affects everyone's login links.

What happens when I hit 10 enrollments on Free?

You'll be prompted to upgrade to Growth before adding the 11th active enrollment. Nothing is deleted; existing enrollments keep working.

Can I run multiple branches?

Yes — each branch is its own school on Spoteca, billed per branch. Contact support to link them.

I own the school and also teach. Two accounts?

Yes — create yourself a Teacher account (Admin view → Teachers). Keep the Super Admin account for management; use the teacher login for your own schedule and availability.

Next → The Admin Guide: teachers, students, scheduling & payments