Session credit software for tutoring practices
TutorCredits keeps a live balance for every student, takes one credit off the minute a session is marked taught, and tells the family before the last one is spent. After the hour ends it drafts a short progress note for the parents, the kind that gets forwarded to grandma the same evening.
Low balance note queued for the family
The daily leak
You did not open a tutoring practice to run a ledger. Every hour you spend reconstructing balances is an hour you are not teaching, and the arithmetic gets expensive faster than most tutors realize.
Packages start on a legal pad, migrate to a phone note, then end up half remembered. By week six nobody is sure whether the Delgado family has four sessions left or one, and the only way to settle it is to scroll back through a calendar.
$40 to $90 lost per forgotten session
The student shows up, you teach a good hour, and the credit never comes off because the evening ran long and you forgot by Thursday. Independent tutors tell us they hand back two to four sessions a month this way without ever deciding to.
Around $1,300 a year per tutor
Nobody notices the balance hit zero until the family says they will call you in the fall. The renewal conversation then happens cold, after the momentum is gone, and it is a much harder ask than the one you could have made two sessions earlier.
18% of packages never get renewed
The family pays for ten sessions up front and then hears nothing concrete until report cards. Silence is the most common reason a household quietly stops booking, and it almost never gets said out loud on the way out.
3 in 10 families churn without a word
None of these are teaching problems. They are bookkeeping problems in a teaching costume, and together they are the reason a schedule that looks full on Sunday night can still end the month short by a few hundred dollars.
Show me the fixHow it works
Set it up on a Tuesday afternoon and the ledger runs itself from the first session onward. Nothing here asks you to change the way you already schedule or teach.
Name it, set the credit count, set the price and choose an expiration window. A 10 credit Algebra II package and a 4 credit essay clinic can sit side by side under the same family, each with its own rate.
Record the check, the card, the Zelle transfer or the district purchase order. The balance opens at full, stamped with who paid, on what date, against which student.
One tap when the hour ends. The credit comes off, the session note attaches to the student record, and the tutor payout line is written in the same motion.
At two credits left the family gets a renewal nudge and you get a heads up in the morning digest. After each session the parent gets a progress note built from the log you already filled in.
What is inside
Six things the ledger does every week without being asked. Each one replaces a habit that currently lives in your head or on a scrap of paper.
Mark the hour taught and the balance drops by one, with no second entry anywhere else. Half hours, double sessions and small group rates each deduct at whatever rate you set on that package.
Choose the trigger at three credits, two or one, and the family hears from you while the tutoring is still in motion. The same alert lands in your morning digest, so the renewal call is never a surprise to either side.
After each session you pick three lines: what was covered, what improved and what to practice before next time. The parent gets a clean note by email with no login to remember and no app to install.
Your 24 hour window is enforced by the ledger instead of by an awkward doorway conversation. Late cancellations burn a credit, approved makeups return one, and both leave a dated record the family can see.
Give a package 90 days, one semester or no limit at all, and the rule sticks without you policing it. Credits approaching their expiry surface on the dashboard early enough to schedule them rather than refund them.
Every completed session writes a payout line at that tutor's rate, hourly or per credit, including group splits. Export the pay period as a CSV and hand it straight to whoever cuts the checks.
By month two
These are the figures practices report back to us after their second full billing month on TutorCredits, drawn from 612 accounts across 44 states.
9 hoursback every month
Package tracking, the who owes what email thread and the monthly reconstruction of balances all land in the same ledger. Practices moving off a spreadsheet see the biggest jump inside four weeks, mostly on Sunday evenings.
22%lift in renewals
The renewal nudge fires at two credits left rather than after the last hour is spent. Families decide while their student is still mid stride, which is exactly when a parent is most willing to buy the next ten.
$1,340recovered per tutor a year
Sessions that used to slip past the notebook now deduct the moment they are marked taught. Across our accounts the median independent tutor recovers the equivalent of 21 sessions in a full year of teaching.
94%of progress notes opened
Notes go out the same evening as the session, from your own practice email address, with the student's name in the subject line. Open rates stay above 90% because families are waiting for them rather than filtering them.
From the practices
Three accounts, three very different shapes of practice, all of them running prepaid packages before they ever heard of us.
★★★★★
I kept package balances in a green notebook and in my head, and one November I worked out that I had taught nine hours off a package that ran dry in October. That is a car payment. Now the balance is on the screen when I mark the hour taught, and the family has the note before I have finished stacking the chairs.
★★★★★
We run 14 tutors across two rooms and the payout sheet used to eat a whole Saturday. A payout line now gets written the second a session is marked taught, so I export the period and I am done before lunch. Renewals climbed too, because the front desk finally knows who is down to their last two credits.
★★★★★
Test prep parents want proof, not encouragement. The note after every session gives them the score trend and one honest sentence about what we drilled, and I have watched three families forward it to a grandparent who then paid for the next package. I would never have thought to ask for that feature.
Plans
One flat monthly fee per practice. No charge per session, no charge per credit, no percentage of what a family pays you.
For one tutor running packages from a home office, a library table or a rented room.
$19per month
For a practice with two to twelve tutors sharing students, rooms and a renewal calendar.
$49per month
For a center invoicing districts and running programs across more than one location.
$119per month
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from the account screen, with no exit fee and no notice period. There is no setup charge, no per session fee and no commission on what families pay you. Your students, balances, session notes and payment history export as CSV files whenever you ask, including on the day you leave.
Straight answers
If yours is not here, put it in the message box further down and we will answer it in writing before any demo.
There are three plans, all billed monthly in US dollars: Independent Tutor at $19 per month, Tutor Team at $49 per month and Learning Center at $119 per month. We do not charge a setup fee, a fee per session, a fee per credit or a percentage of what families pay you, so a packed March costs exactly what a quiet July costs. What moves you between plans is the number of active students and whether you need per tutor payout lines. You can switch plan or cancel from the account screen without booking a call with anyone.
Most independent tutors are running live the same afternoon they start. You create your package types, bring students in from a CSV or type them in by hand, then enter each open balance as it stands today. Centers with more than a hundred active students usually take two working days, and we sit on a screen share with you for the balance import so nothing gets miscounted. Your schedule, your rates and your cancellation policy all stay exactly as they are on day one.
Records sit on servers in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest, and they are never sold, rented or handed to advertisers. Each tutor sees only the students assigned to them unless you give that person an admin seat, and parents see their own family view and nothing beyond it. You can export the whole account as CSV at any hour of any day. If you ask us to delete the account, the records go and they stay gone, and we confirm it in writing.
Sessions push to Google Calendar and Apple Calendar, so the schedule you already keep stays the schedule you keep. Payments recorded in the ledger export to QuickBooks and to Xero in the layout your bookkeeper expects, and the plain CSV opens cleanly in Sheets and Excel. Progress notes send from your own practice email address so parents recognize the sender rather than filtering it. If you need a direct connection we do not have yet, say so on the demo and we will tell you plainly whether it is on the roadmap or not.
You cancel from the account screen, the plan stops at the end of the month you have already paid for, and there is no exit fee or notice period. Before you go, export your students, balances, session notes and payment history as CSV files that open in any spreadsheet program. We keep the account readable for 30 days in case you change your mind, then remove it. Seasonal practices often pause in June and come back in August, and everything is exactly where they left it.
It does not, because TutorCredits records the payment rather than processing the money. A check handed over at the kitchen table, a Zelle transfer, a card run through the reader you already own and a district purchase order all open a package in the same three fields: amount, method and date. You mark the payment received and the credits become available immediately. Practices that take cards keep whatever processor they have today, and the ledger simply files the reference number next to the package.
Session Notes
Reporting on the craft, pricing, and paperwork of running an independent tutoring practice in the United States. Three pieces from the current issue, then the whole run.
practical guide
Parents forward the plan the night before the first session. Here is how to find the accommodations, present levels, and goals that change what you actually do at the table.
comparison
The digital SAT is adaptive and shorter. The ACT runs with an optional science section. Here is how each format changes prep hours, pacing drills, and the score a student can realistically reach.
mistakes to avoid
Most tutoring practices lose more hours to fuzzy rescheduling rules than to lost clients. These are the policy gaps that let credits burn without a lesson happening, and how to close each one.
Book a walkthrough
Pick the student whose package has been argued about twice this month. In a 20 minute call we will build that package live, mark a session taught, and you will watch the credit come off, the alert queue up and the parent note draft itself.
A real person from the product team answers every message within one business day, Monday to Friday. If you would rather skip the form, write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and say what your practice teaches.