A monthly marketplace for tutoring slots, that bills itself.
An ACT/SAT test-prep company had thirty-plus families competing for a limited grid of tutoring sessions every month, allocated by hand in spreadsheets and billed separately. We turned the whole thing into one system.
The problem
Every month, thirty-plus families competed for a limited grid of tutoring slots. Allocation lived in spreadsheets: collect everyone's requests, place them by hand, resolve the collisions, and then bill each family separately. It ate the owner's time, mistakes were easy, and the schedule and the money never lived in the same place.
What we built
A monthly marketplace for the schedule, with the allocation and the billing in one system. It runs on a four-step cycle:
Bidding opens and each family ranks the sessions they want for the coming month.
Bidding closes and a weighted algorithm drafts the whole month: every placement scored and explainable, with same-day and back-to-back limits and a floor for new families.
The owner reviews the draft on a drag-and-drop board, makes any changes by hand, and publishes. Publishing freezes the schedule and announces it.
Cards charge on the 1st with a decline-retry ladder. Trades, cancellations, and owner overrides all settle with exact credits.
The hard part
The draft is the interesting part. It is not first-come-first-served; it is a weighted assignment that has to be fair and explainable. Every placement carries a score the owner can inspect, the rules that keep it humane are enforced in code (no back-to-back marathons, no two sessions the same day, a guaranteed floor for families new to the practice), and the money math is exact: when a slot is traded or an owner moves a family, the displaced family is credited at the right rate automatically. Getting that right is why the first billing run needed no corrections.
The outcome
It is live and it runs the business. The first cycle went end to end: 32 families bid, the algorithm drafted the month, the owner adjusted and published, and a five-figure month of tutoring billed itself on the 1st, with zero double-booked slots and zero billing errors. What used to be the owner's least favorite week of the month now happens on its own.
Want the same thing?
Scheduling, allocation, and billing that currently live in three different places are exactly the kind of thing worth turning into one system. See custom software or the other systems we've built.
Have a scheduling or billing headache that repeats every month?
A thirty-minute call with the person who would build it. No pitch, no slide deck. We will tell you if we are not the right fit.