TutorCredits

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Jimenez Julien, the person behind TutorCredits

Founder of MLJ, SASU. He writes the code, answers the demo requests and takes the phone call when a credit balance looks wrong.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Why a credit ledger, and why tutoring

TutorCredits started with a shoebox. A tutor in Albuquerque who taught my cousin kept her package balances on index cards in a shoebox, one card per family, a tally mark per session. She was excellent at algebra and completely honest about the fact that she had no idea how much teaching she had given away over the years. When I asked her to guess, she said maybe forty hours. When we reconstructed two years of cards together over a weekend, the real number was closer to ninety.

That weekend is the entire reason this product exists. The tutoring trade sells time in advance and delivers it in one hour pieces, sometimes for eighteen months, and almost nobody has a system built for that shape. Practice management tools built for salons or gyms treat every visit as a fresh transaction. School platforms assume a district is paying. Neither of them has a place to put the sentence that matters most in tutoring, which is how many hours does this family still have and what should I tell them about their kid.

I spent the first six months of the build sitting in on sessions rather than writing code. I watched tutors work in a public library branch, in a converted garage in Tucson, at a folding table in a church basement and in a proper storefront center with eleven rooms. What I learned is that the paperwork always happens at the worst possible moment: in the four minutes between one student leaving and the next one arriving, or at ten at night when the day is already over. Anything that takes more than one tap in that window does not get done, and everything that does not get done becomes an argument with a parent three weeks later.

So the rule I built to was simple. Marking a session taught has to be a single action, and that single action has to do all the bookkeeping: deduct the credit, stamp the tutor, open the note, write the payout line, and check whether the family needs a renewal warning. If a feature could not be reached inside that one tap, it went into a screen tutors visit on Sunday instead of a screen they visit between students. That constraint is why the ledger looks plain. Plain is what survives a Tuesday evening.

The other thing I did not expect to matter as much as it does is the parent note. I added it late, almost as an afterthought, because two center directors asked for something they could send home. It turned out to be the feature that saves packages. Parents who receive three sentences after every session renew at a noticeably higher rate than parents who receive silence, and quite a few of them forward the note to a grandparent who ends up paying for the next block of hours. Tutors knew this instinctively. The software just made it take ninety seconds instead of fifteen minutes.

Experience and expertise

I have built and shipped small business software for the last decade, most of it for trades where the operator is also the person doing the work: one person shops, two person practices, family run centers. Before TutorCredits I spent several years on scheduling and billing systems, which is where I learned that the hard part is almost never the calendar. The hard part is money that has already changed hands and services that have not been delivered yet, because that is where trust either holds or breaks.

  • Ten years building operational software for owner operated US businesses, from first line of code to support inbox.
  • Direct research with 40 tutoring practices across 14 states, including four multi room centers billing school districts.
  • Hands on experience with prepaid package accounting, expiring credits, makeup policies and tutor payout math.
  • Founder of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes TutorCredits and a small family of similar tools.

How this product is built and maintained

TutorCredits is developed and supported by one accountable person rather than a rotating team, and that shapes what gets promised. I do not ship a feature I cannot support on a Saturday. Every change goes out behind a written note in the account, and anything that touches a credit balance is tested against a set of real anonymized ledgers taken from practices that agreed to lend them to us.

Editorially, the standard on this site is that a number has to come from somewhere. Every figure quoted on the home page comes from aggregated account data or from a survey of the practices using the product, and if a figure moves, the page gets corrected rather than quietly left in place. The testimonials are real customers who agreed in writing to be named with their business and city. Nothing on this site is a stock quotation attributed to a role.

On the product side, three standards hold. Your data belongs to you and exports as CSV on demand, including the day you cancel. Pricing is published in full on the pricing section and does not change without notice to existing accounts. Support is answered by the person who wrote the code, in one business day, in plain language.

Published articles

These are the nine reports I have written for Session Notes, the TutorCredits magazine covering the craft, pricing, and paperwork of an independent tutoring practice.

Contact the author

If something in the ledger looks wrong, if a parent note went to the wrong address, or if you simply want to argue about how expiration windows should work, write to me directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read every message myself. If you want a walkthrough of the product with your own package types, the fastest route is the request form on the home page, and you can see the plans and what each one includes in the pricing section.

Publisher details, company registration and hosting information are on the legal notice. How submissions are handled is set out in the privacy policy.

This page is maintained by Jimenez Julien and was last reviewed on March 2, 2026. The author page lives at tutorcredits.com/author.html.