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

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, private-lesson requests from the Portal, 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 parent requests a private lesson through the portal, an attendance sheet needs reviewing, a teacher calls in sick - 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.

Adding a new tasks & reminder

Inside a tasks & reminder record