👑 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 your two free months right away — the rest of this month and all of next — 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.

The first screen explains before it asks

The wizard opens on an explanation, not a form: "Four steps for your school to be ready", with the four steps drawn out 1‑2‑3‑4 and roughly how long each takes. There is nothing to fill in — read it, then press Start with subjects.

It exists because owners used to land straight on "create a pricing plan" with no idea why that was first, and quite a few closed the tab there.

🌍 Three settings, set onceOn that same first screen, three cards sit side by side: Language, Currency and Time zone. They are pre-filled from your signup — change anything that's wrong, then move on.

Language — what everyone at your school sees. Each person can still switch their own from their top bar.
Currency — what every price, invoice and receipt is shown in.
Time zone — where the school is, not where you happen to be sitting. See Section 5 for exactly what it changes.

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	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.
2	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.
3	First teacher	Every lesson belongs to a teacher. They get their own login and their own schedule.
4	Teacher availability	The scheduler only offers slots a teacher is free for. Without this, enrolment shows an empty slot list.

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.

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.

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

This step paints one teacher's week, not the school's opening hours. The teachers you created are listed with the hours each already has; pick one and their weekly grid opens, exactly as it does under Admin → Teachers → Availability. Drag across the grid to paint when they can be booked, then Save, then go back and do the next one.

This is the step that actually makes your school bookable. The timetable only ever reads a teacher's own availability, so until at least one teacher has hours, enrolment will offer no slots at all.

Why not the school's hours?It used to paint the school's opening hours here and offer to copy them onto teachers. Schools finished the step with a beautifully painted week and still couldn't book a lesson, because nothing schedules against school hours. They are still there — School Settings → School Hours — as a template teachers can Import instead of painting a week by hand. See section 9 if your school runs fixed hours.

⚠️ "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 the ? button (bottom corner of every page) and choose Ask AI for answers about your own school, or follow this guide.

🚀 The setup guide opens on your first visitA four-step wizard appears the first time you land here. It opens on a screen that simply explains what is coming — "Four steps for your school to be ready" — and then walks you through subjects, a pricing plan, a teacher, and that teacher's availability, in that order. Each step ticks itself off automatically as you complete it: the wizard reads your school's real data, so it always shows where you actually stand. Language, currency and time zone sit as three cards on that first screen. Full detail in section 2.

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 four steps are done and you click Finish, it disappears for good.

Every step renders the real form inline — the same subject list, plan builder, teacher form and availability grid described later in this guide, not a simplified copy. The last step opens each teacher's own weekly grid, because teacher availability is the only thing the scheduler reads; the rule that traps most new schools is 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 My account, 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, Financial Reports and Ask AI Questions.

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 · Pricing Plans · Closed Days · Terms · Preferences · Subjects · Rooms · Curriculum · Admin Accounts · School Hours. Wherever this guide says "School Settings → Tab", it means one of these tabs.

4 · Create pricing plans

Sidebar → School Settings → Pricing Plans 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.

How the form is laid out — student on one side, teacher on the other

The plan form is split by who each field affects. It used to interleave the two, and owners were typing a teacher's rate into what they thought was the price.

"What the student pays" — price, billing frequency, sessions, lesson type, duration, lessons per week, and allowed reschedules per month. Reschedules sit at the end of this half, before you reach anything about the teacher, because they are a student entitlement.
"What the teacher earns" — the teacher rate and the rate basis, and nothing else.

A running total bar shows what the student is charged and what the teacher is paid for the same period, side by side, updating as you type. An obviously wrong rate — a teacher earning more than the school collects — is visible before you save rather than on the first invoice.

⏰ Cancellation notice (optional)In the student half of the form, Cancellation notice sets how much warning a family must give. A lesson they cancel with less notice counts as used, like a no-show — the office can still waive it. It is None by default. A second switch, Accept reschedule requests inside the notice window, decides whether families may still ask to move a lesson that starts sooner than that. Reschedules allowed per month sits beside it and is counted per subject.

🧾 Paid in instalmentsA plan can split each period's price into instalments. It is still one invoice, with a schedule of parts underneath, each with its own due date — see Payments in the Admin guide.

Programs — coming soon

When you create a plan you'll see a third type beside Individual and Group Class: Program, marked Coming soon. A program will let you sell several lessons — say piano plus choir — for one price. It isn't available yet; for now, sell each lesson on its own plan. This guide will explain it in full the day it arrives.

Auto-renew — does this plan continue by itself?

Every plan carries an auto-renew toggle. On a Per Term plan it decides what happens when the term ends:

ON — when the term rolls over, the student is carried into the next term automatically and the next term's invoice is raised. A student on Fall continues into Winter without anyone re-enrolling them. This runs every term, not only the first.
OFF — the enrollment ends with the term. Nothing is billed for the next one, and you re-enrol whoever comes back.

It is set per plan, so a school can run "Fall only" workshops and year-long programmes side by side. The same toggle governs group classes on a term plan.

⚠️ Check it on plans you created earlierAuto-renew defaults to ON. If you built term plans for one-off workshops, open them and turn it off before your first term rollover — otherwise those students will be invoiced for a term you never meant to sell.

＋

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 — any size; it is resized automatically), brand colors, currency (shown on invoices and receipts — USD, EUR, JOD and more), time zone (see below), 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 Plans — the pricing plans from the previous step.
Closed Days — single dates the school is shut (holidays): no lessons are scheduled on them.
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, whether teachers see a student's other subjects.
Admin Accounts — your staff logins (covered in section 6).

Open days

School Settings → School Profile → Open days — tick the weekdays your school works. Every calendar and schedule in the school then shows only those days, for everyone.

A day with classes on it can't be closed. Untick it while lessons are still booked and nothing is saved: Spoteca lists the weekly lessons and group classes on that day, with a link to each, so you can move them first.
If a closed day ever does have something on it, it stays visible with a Closed tag, so no lesson silently disappears.
Open days are not Closed Days (single holiday dates, on their own tab) and not School Hours (the opening-hours template teachers can import).

Your school's time zone

School Settings → School Profile → Time zone — or on the first screen of the setup wizard, beside Language and Currency.

Pick where the school is, not where you happen to be sitting. An owner checking in from abroad should still see their school's own clock.

What it changes: every time Spoteca shows you. The calendar, the schedule, attendance, audit-log timestamps, "created" and "paid" times on invoices and receipts, notification times — all of it is displayed in your school's zone, whatever device the reader is on.

What it does not change: days and dates. A lesson booked for Tuesday is Tuesday everywhere. Only clock times and timestamps follow the zone.

🕘 Never set one? Nothing changes.A school that has never chosen a time zone keeps behaving exactly as before: every time is shown on each reader's own device clock. There is no silent default — "unset" is its own state, not UTC. The moment you pick a zone, everything above starts following it.

Why it is worth settingBeyond display: "today" is decided in your zone. Which day a session belongs to, which month an invoice lands in, and the date a group class activates on are all worked out from your school's clock. A school in Beirut activating a class at 9pm should not have it dated tomorrow because a server in another country has already rolled over.

School settings — one tabbed page for identity, subjects, rooms, pricing, terms and preferences.

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.

🔎 What a teacher sees on a student's reportOpen a student from Teacher view → Reports and the chips under their name list the other subjects and classes they take, and who teaches them. That is on by default: it is ordinary staffroom context, and it helps a teacher set homework around the rest of a student's week. Turn it off under Preferences → "Teachers Can See a Student's Other Subjects" and each teacher sees only their own. Lesson notes are never affected — a teacher only ever reads the notes they wrote themselves, whichever way this is set.

👥 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.

💸 Letting admins handle expensesExpenses are yours by default: you record them in Financial Reports, and you always see Admin view → Money → Expenses. Turn on Preferences → "Allow Admins to Manage Expenses" to let your admins see the list and add expenses too. While it is off they cannot see or add any.

🔢 Lessons a weekA plan can't meet more often than it sells: a trial is 1 lesson a week, and a pack of N sessions at most N a week.

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.

On step 4 you are at the top of the list, marked (you) and Start here — press Paint availability to mark the hours you teach. The same goes for a teacher you have just added: whoever has no hours yet comes first, newest first.

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.

If you stop teaching

Use I stop teaching here on the same screen. That removes the teacher profile from your account and leaves your login exactly as it was.

⚠️ Never deactivate your own teacher recordDeactivating a teacher switches off the login behind them and resets its password — right for a teacher who has left, but if that teacher is you, it locks you out of your own school. With no active owner, even we cannot get in to help. Spoteca now refuses this and points you here instead, but the safe move is always I stop teaching here.

The same applies to any admin who also teaches: remove them from teaching, or deactivate the person from Admin Accounts — not from the teacher list.

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).
Group Classes — the class, its weekly slots and its members. Imported as drafts: nobody is invoiced and no register exists until you activate the class yourself. Use Weekly Slots for a class that meets more than once a week — "Monday 17:00, Wednesday 16:00" — which is exactly how the export writes it.
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.

Where exams and student progress actually live

This tab is the library — it defines what your school teaches. No student appears on it. Applying any of it to a person — ticking skills, assigning pieces, awarding badges, setting a practice goal, recording exams — happens on that student's Progress page: Students → ⋯ More → Progress on the student's row.

Exams & assessments lives at the bottom of that page. It records both the exams your school sets and the ones a student sits elsewhere — useful if you prepare students for exams at their own school. Two things are asked, independently of each other: who sets it (We set it, or Their school with the school named) and when it is — a future date is a plan, a past date is a record. Status follows by itself: planned until there is a result, then done; only Missed it is set by hand. Use Edit to fill in the grade afterwards, as words, as a number with the mark it is out of (16 / 20), or both.

ℹ️ Teachers are limited, admins are notA teacher can only record an exam for a subject they actually teach that student. You and your admins can record any subject for any student.

11 · Your Spoteca plan & billing

Sidebar → School Settings → Billing

Plan	Cost	What it means
Free	$0	Every feature, up to 10 enrollments a month. No time limit, no card. A month at 10 or fewer is never invoiced.
Growth	$1 per enrollment a month, capped at $100 a month	Above 10. An enrollment counts for a month when it has at least one lesson that month — one per individual enrollment, one per student in a group class. Whether you invoiced it makes no difference, and an enrollment with no lessons is not counted.

📧 When a bill is raised, you are emailedSpoteca closes each month on the 1st and, if anything is owed, emails your school's billing address the invoice the same day — invoice number, the month, the enrollment count behind it, the total, and a due date of the 7th. A month inside your free allowance, and your one free month after you first grow past 10, are recorded as settled and no email is sent — there is nothing to pay.

Seeing exactly what you are paying for

On the Billing page, the month in progress carries a “What am I paying for?” link. Open it and you get every counted enrollment for that month: the student, the subject or the class name, whether it is an individual enrollment or a place in a group class, and how many lessons made it countable.

A program counts one enrollment for each lesson it contains: a program of three individual lessons and two group classes counts five, exactly as it would if you had enrolled the student in each separately. Bundling lessons into a program never changes your Spoteca bill.

Two things worth knowing when you read it. A student studying two subjects appears twice, because that is two enrollments. And once your school passes 10, every counted enrollment is charged — not only the ones past ten — up to the $100 monthly maximum.

The free trial

The first month your school teaches more than 10 enrollments is free, and so is the whole month after it — whatever size you reach in either. Go over 10 on 20 October and October and November cost nothing however many you end with, and you're charged from December. Only enrollments that actually had a lesson in the month are counted, so enrolling students for a later term costs nothing until you teach them. Two free months per school. Signing up on the paid card simply starts them at signup rather than waiting for you to cross 10 — and if you never pass 10 during that period, you haven't used them: they wait for whenever you do. After them, if you're back at 10 or fewer you pay nothing anyway; if you're still above 10 you simply move to the Growth plan. Your account is never suspended for growing — nothing is locked and nothing is deleted.

Paying on time

Each invoice is due in 14 days; a reminder is emailed after 7.
Unpaid after that, the school becomes Past due: everything stays readable, but changes are switched off until it's settled. You and your admins see a banner explaining why; your teachers, students and parents only see a note to contact the office — never that the school owes money.
Questions about a Spoteca invoice: support@spoteca.com.

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 — what each teacher actually did: lessons given, registers taken (with any past lesson they never marked), lesson notes written out of the lessons that needed one ("7 of 9 · 2 missing"), and their own absences — school closures aren't counted against anyone — plus what they've been paid and are owed. Open a teacher's row to see their students' attendance and rating.
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.

🩺 Schedule healthAlso on Financial Reports: Schedule health lists any active lesson that has nothing coming up on the calendar, with a Rebuild weekly button, and any session pack whose hand-picked dates have run out. Revenue on this page is money actually received, less refunds — not the face value of invoices marked paid. The cards at the top add up left to right: Total Collected − Paid to Teachers − Total Expenses = Net Profit, with Outstanding kept apart at the end because unpaid invoices aren't cash yet. The default range is All time — use This month for the current picture.

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.

14 · Your account, deleting & help

My account

Sidebar → School Settings → My account — your own name, email, phone, address, photo and password. Changing your email asks for your current password and sends a confirmation link to the new address; nothing changes until you click it. Your username can't be changed.

Deleting a student or a teacher

Only you can permanently delete, from the student's or teacher's menu in the Admin view — and it's meant for accounts created by mistake. A student who was ever enrolled or invoiced can't be deleted: invoices are records. Use Deactivate instead; billing stops and history stays.

Ask AI — and what your people ask it

The ? button opens Ask AI, which answers questions about Spoteca in each person's language and can see your school's setup (open days, teachers and their availability, plans, classes — never records or payments). Analytics → Ask AI Questions shows every question your staff, teachers and families asked, so you can spot what confuses them. A 👎 under an answer reaches the Spoteca team.

FAQ

What must I finish before my staff can work?

Subjects and at least one pricing plan — those are the hard requirements. Then add teachers and get their 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?

Write to support@spoteca.com — changing it affects everyone's login links.

What happens when I go above 10 enrollments?

Nothing stops. The first month you teach more than 10 is free; after that you pay $1 per enrollment a month, never more than $100. See Billing.

Can I run multiple branches?

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

I own the school and also teach. Two accounts?

No — see Teaching here yourself. Use I teach here too and switch views with one login.

Why can't I untick a weekday?

Classes are still booked on it. The message lists them; move them to a day you stay open, then untick it.

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