Glossary: school management terms in plain English

An append-only ledger is a bookkeeping principle in which financial records are never edited or deleted — you can only add new ones. If an amount is wrong, you don't erase the old line; you add a separate correcting entry, so the full history stays visible: here is the payment, here is the correction, here is who made it and when. For a school this means calm in three situations: disputes with parents are settled in a second by showing the history, nobody can quietly "adjust" a debt after the fact, and the totals always match the transactions because they are derived from them.

An attendance journal is the record of what actually happened in each lesson — present, late or absent — together with the status of the lesson itself (delivered, cancelled, rescheduled). The teacher marks attendance from the lesson panel right after the lesson, and that same data then feeds the whole system: it deducts from the lesson balance, drives the teacher's payroll, and flags churn signals. So one mark is entered once and works everywhere, instead of the same facts being re-typed across several spreadsheets.

Automatic teacher payroll means a teacher's pay is calculated not in a separate spreadsheet but straight from the journal of delivered lessons, at the rate stored on their profile. The rate can be a fixed amount per lesson or a percentage of the student's payment, and you pay by lesson status, not by the plan — delivered counts, cancelled with notice doesn't, rescheduled counts once, a substitution goes to whoever actually taught. A mid-month reschedule therefore breaks nothing: you move the lesson on the calendar and the total recalculates itself, with the teacher seeing the same breakdown the admin does.

CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) is the pan-European scale of language proficiency with six steps: A1 and A2 for beginners, B1 and B2 for independent users, C1 and C2 for proficient speakers. For a language school it is a shared language with the student: groups are formed by it, materials are matched to it, progress is measured against it, and international exams such as Cambridge or IELTS map onto the same scale. In the school’s records the level is captured as early as the inquiry stage, determines the student’s group, and changes together with a move up the ladder — with the lesson history preserved.

Churn-risk scoring is an automatic estimate of how likely a student is to stop attending soon, assembled from early signals: several absences in a row, a declining attendance rate, abandoned homework, an empty future schedule, a balance at zero or an overdue invoice. Instead of reviewing every profile by hand, the school gets a short "who to call today" list each morning, each with a plain-language reason. The point isn't the risk number itself — it's catching the signal early, while the student can still be brought back.

A CRM for a language school is a system that keeps everything the school runs on in one place: the schedule and attendance journal, invoices, payments and debts, lesson balances and teacher payroll, student retention and a parent portal. Unlike a general-purpose CRM, it is built around the lesson as the unit of account, so debt is counted per student, teacher pay comes from delivered lessons, and a balance is measured in lessons rather than only in money. The goal is simple: the school owner shouldn't be reconciling several spreadsheets by hand, but seeing the whole picture on a few calm screens.

A CRM for an online school is a record-keeping system that holds everything a school of any subject runs on — language, math or exam-prep courses — in one place: the schedule and attendance journal, invoices and payments, lesson balances, teacher payroll, student retention and a parent portal. It differs from a general-purpose sales CRM in being built around the lesson as the unit of account. Language schools can also use spaced-repetition vocabulary and CEFR levels, while every school organizes its disciplines through subjects, products and groups.

Four-eyes approval is a working mode in which sensitive money operations — balance adjustments, debt write-offs, invoice cancellations, a “paid” mark — never execute immediately: they first become a request that the school owner or a trusted administrator has to approve. Whoever created the request can never approve it themselves, and an approved action re-runs with all the usual validations, as if new. In finance this principle is called maker-checker: one person initiates, another confirms — so mistakes and abuse are caught before any money actually moves.

Gamification is a retention mechanic where a student earns coins for attending lessons, submitting homework on time and completing vocabulary sessions, accumulates them and climbs through levels, collecting stickers from the teacher. The reward shop is where those coins become real prizes: the school adds items (a book, a sticker pack, a lesson with a native speaker) and sets each a coin price, the student redeems what they've saved, and an administrator approves the order. Together with streaks — runs of consecutive days with any activity — these mechanics support regular practice between lessons.

A lead funnel is the path a prospective student takes from first inquiry to enrollment, broken into stages: new inquiry, contact made, trial lesson scheduled, trial delivered, converted to a student, or declined. Each lead has a card with its source (Instagram, website, referral), language and level, so the school sees not just who is at which stage but which channels actually bring in students who stay. When a lead agrees, you convert them to a student in one click — the data and the trial-lesson history carry over with no re-entry.

A lesson balance is a student's prepayment expressed in lessons rather than money. The student paid for 8 lessons and has attended 3, so 5 remain on the balance. For a school this is the most natural unit of all, because lessons are what you actually run, not abstract sums, and the student sees a plain "5 lessons left" at any moment. A balance works ahead of time: it shows you who needs a top-up reminder before they ever go into the red.

A lesson series is a set of recurring lessons that repeat on a schedule — say, every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 p.m. — created with a single setup instead of entering each lesson one by one. An active student always has series lessons booked next week and beyond, which is why an empty future schedule becomes a signal in itself: either the series ended and wasn't renewed, or the student asked for a pause. A single lesson within the series can be rescheduled or cancelled without touching the rest, and those changes flow straight into the balance and payroll.

Multi-entity accounting means tying a school payment to the specific legal entity it arrived through when that entity is configured or selected for the operation. Ukrainian schools often collect money via several sole proprietors (“FOPs”): one for bank transfers, another for online card processing. When the books are kept per entity, the owner sees each entity’s cash-in and recognized revenue, invoices automatically carry the right payee details with the bank and IBAN, and unattributed amounts are honestly grouped under “Unassigned” so the overall picture always reconciles. In Mimiao a selected entity is stamped on a payment and never changes afterwards — just like the rest of the append-only ledger.

A parent portal is a separate cabinet where parents see everything that matters about their child's learning themselves: the schedule, attendance, homework with the teacher's grades and feedback, how many lessons are left on the balance, and invoices to pay. After signing in to their invited cabinet, an unpaid invoice is shown with a "Pay" button, so parents pay by card in two taps with no access to the school's admin panel. This removes the stream of "how's my Max doing?" calls and gives parents transparency, while keeping internal notes, school finances and teacher pay out of their view.

Per-teacher pricing is a pricing model for the CRM itself, where the plan depends on the size of the teaching team rather than the number of students within each plan's pool. The school doesn't pay more for signing up a new group, so growing your student base within the plan's limit is never punished with a bigger software bill. In Mimiao the price is tied to how many people actually work in the school — not how many children study in it — and a solo tutor starts from a low-cost $9/mo entry plan.

Spaced repetition — often shortened to SRS, a spaced repetition system — is a memorisation method in which a word is reviewed at the exact moment the learner is about to forget it: first after a day, then three days, a week, a month. Each well-timed review flattens the forgetting curve, so knowledge moves from short-term into long-term memory without cramming. The algorithm handles all the scheduling and assembles a small daily deck of the cards that are due for a nudge today — all the learner has to do is open it for ten minutes.