Getting started

How alinaflow is put together

Five ideas carry most of the product, and they are worth ten minutes before you touch anything else, because every screen assumes them.

A student is the person who attends. A family is who gets invoiced. They are separate records on purpose: that is what lets you bill one household once for three children in six different classes, and message a parent without opening each child in turn. A family with one adult student in it is perfectly normal; the family record still exists, it just has one member.

A course is what you teach. A class is one scheduled instance of it, with a room, a teacher and a time. Define the course once, with its levels, and every class built from it inherits that structure. A private lesson is the same idea with one student in it.

An enrollment joins a student to a class. It is the record that drives everything downstream: attendance expects the enrolled students, tuition is billed per enrollment, and a student who leaves mid-term is a closed enrollment rather than a deleted one, so last term's invoices still make sense.

An invoice belongs to the family, not the student. Payments are allocated against invoices, and what is left over is the balance you chase. Everything in Billing is built on that one relationship.

The order to set things up in, if you are starting from an empty workspace: locations and rooms, then courses and their levels, then teachers, then classes, then tuition and fees, and only then students and families. Each step depends on the ones above it, and importing students before there are classes to put them in means doing the enrollments twice.

You do not have to use all of it. A school that only wants scheduling and attendance can ignore the CRM, the shows and the facilities sections entirely; nothing elsewhere breaks if those stay empty.

AI Front Desk

Type what you want in plain language and Alina does it. She reads live data from your own workspace and can enrol a student, reschedule a class, send an invoice or update a record. Before anything is written she shows you the exact change and waits for your approval, so reading is instant and writing always needs a yes. When something genuinely cannot be known from your data she says so rather than guessing. The suggested prompts under the chat box are a good way to see what she can do.

Ask in plain language and Alina does the work, then tells you what happened - including when something did not go through.

A conversation in progress

Ask Alina for what you need in plain words, and follow up in the same thread. It keeps track of the families and classes you already talked about. Before it sends anything, like an SMS to families, Alina shows you the exact message and waits for you to approve it, so read the wording before you say go ahead. If something fails, such as a phone number on file that isn't valid, Alina tells you what went wrong and offers another option, like sending by email instead. Check the result yourself before you assume families were told.

Sections of this screen

This screen is divided into sections: Previous chats. Each is part of the same screen rather than a separate page.

Previous chats

Open Previous chats to go back to an earlier conversation with Alina and pick up where you left off, newest first. Each chat is titled after what it covered and dated, so look for the topic and day rather than scrolling through everything. The answers in an old chat reflect your school's data at that moment, so if students, classes or invoices have changed since, ask Alina again before acting on them.

Dashboard

The tabs across the top each answer a different question: General for headline counts, Finances for money in and owed, Marketing and Sales for where enquiries come from and how many convert, Classes and Students for capacity and attendance, Retention for who is at risk, Teachers for load and cost. Start on General, then move to the tab that matches whatever you are worried about this week.

Tasks & Reminders

What are Tasks & Reminders?

Your list of Tasks & Reminders - everything the staff has to handle: room-booking approvals, overdue rentals, level-change suggestions, substitute-instructor requests, attendance reviews, Portal bookings waiting for approval, leave requests, overdue invoices, dunning escalations, failing jobs - plus freeform notes you leave for teammates. The red number on the Tasks icon counts the open items assigned to you (or unassigned). System reminders disappear automatically when their source resolves (the rental comes back, the booking is approved). Snooze moves a reminder off your list until later; Dismiss hides a system reminder until you Reopen it.

This is the closest thing alinaflow has to a shared to-do list, and most of it fills itself. A rental goes overdue, a Portal booking is waiting for approval, a family asks for a leave, an attendance sheet needs reviewing, a teacher reports an absence or books time off over their lessons - each of those creates a task without anyone typing it. The count on the icon in the header is what is open and yours. Work top down and the list empties itself: a system task disappears when the thing that caused it is resolved, so returning the rental clears the row. You do not tick it off, you fix the underlying thing. Add your own with New task when you need to leave a note for whoever is on the desk tomorrow. A Portal booking waiting for approval is settled in Portal Studio, Orders, and a leave request is approved or declined right from its task or from the student's page.

Adding a new tasks & reminder

Use this form for a freeform task, like a call a family is waiting on or a follow-up for a teammate. Only the title is required, so write it as a clear action a colleague can pick up without asking you. Pick someone under Assigned to, or leave it empty so the task shows up for the whole staff. Internal notes are for staff only and are never shown to families, so put anything sensitive there and keep it out of the description.

Inside a tasks & reminder record

Open a task to update it as work moves along: raise or lower the priority, push the due date, or hand it to a teammate in Assigned to. Nothing changes until you click Save Changes, so check your edits before leaving the page. Use Internal notes to record what you already tried, so whoever picks it up next does not repeat the same call.