Booking software for tutors in Australia: exam seasons, parents who pay and students who attend

Tutoring looks like a diary of weekly one to one appointments. It behaves like a seasonal business shaped by a small number of dates: NAPLAN, trials, and the HSC, VCE, QCE or equivalent.

Two things follow from that, and neither is obvious from the calendar.

1. Ask when the exam is. It is the most useful field on your form.

A parent who books in February usually did so BECAUSE of a date in October, not in spite of it. Knowing that date changes the plan, the number of sessions, and when it is reasonable to talk about an intensive.

It also tells you something about your own year. A tutor who can see that eleven current students sit exams in a six week window can plan capacity for it instead of discovering it.

Ask as a list rather than free text, because 'exams' means five different things depending on the year level, and a parent will write the wrong one.

2. The person paying is not the person attending

This trips up setups built for salons, where the client and the payer are the same adult. In tutoring the student attends and the parent pays, and they often do not share an inbox.

Capture the parent's contact separately at enrolment and send confirmations and reminders there. A reminder that reaches a fourteen year old's inbox and not their mother's is a missed session waiting to happen.

3. Sell blocks, and price online correctly

Selling session by session means a decision every fortnight, usually at the exact point in a term where progress feels slowest. A five or ten session block removes that.

The subtle part is online. Most tutors charge a little less for a video session because there is no travel, which is right. But if a block covers BOTH in person and online sessions, it has to be priced against the cheaper of the two, or a student taking every session online has paid more than booking them singly.

Covering both also means a student who is unwell, or away, can switch to video without losing the session. That is the common case, and it should not cost them.

4. Run a free first assessment

A short no charge session to work out where a student is at converts materially better than a paid trial, and it gives you the information you need to propose a real plan rather than a guess.

This is the opposite of the advice for music teaching, and the reason is that tutoring is bought to solve an urgent problem while music is bought as a long term commitment. Parents shopping under pressure want to meet you first.

5. Ask what has already been tried

Including anything that made it worse. A student who has had two previous tutors arrives with a history, and so does one with a diagnosed learning need and support already in place at school. Both change the first session, and neither comes up unless you ask.

6. What to use

• Tutoring centre platforms handle timetabling across many tutors, payroll and progress reporting. Worth it at centre scale with employed tutors.
• General booking tools handle a one to one session fine and are a reasonable fit for a solo tutor, though they usually cannot sell a block of sessions.
• BookAndGo: one to one and small group sessions, blocks that can cover in person and online together, custom intake including exam dates, separate parent contacts, travel time for in-home tutors, Australian data hosting and GST invoicing, flat AU$59 per month excluding GST.