The client
A specialist tutoring company that matches students who have special educational needs (SEN) with the right expert tutors — and supports both sides through the whole relationship. Their work is high-stakes and high-touch: the right match changes a child's trajectory, and every tutor has to be vetted, compliant, scheduled, and paid correctly.
The business was growing fast. The system running it was not keeping up.
The challenge
The entire operation ran on a single Excel spreadsheet — built ad hoc, edited by hand, and stretched far past what a spreadsheet should hold. As clients and tutors multiplied, that one file became the bottleneck for everything:
- Matching students to tutors was manual and hard to track.
- Enquiries came in with no reliable capture, source tracking, or follow-up.
- Tutor onboarding — applications, role assignment, and DBS background-check compliance — lived in people's heads and inboxes.
- Invoicing was the worst of it: tutor submissions, validation, accounting, and chasing late payments were all manual and error-prone.
- Visibility was near zero — no live view of clients, tutors, pipeline, or finances.
A spreadsheet can start a business. It can't run one at this scale.
What we built
Over an 18-month partnership, we replaced the spreadsheet with a work operating system — a single source of truth on monday.com, with Make.com automating the work between tools. It runs the business end to end:
- Enquiry capture & CRM — website booking forms feed straight into client and tutor boards, with source tracking (organic vs. ads) and automated assignment.
- Tutor recruitment & compliance — a role-application system (apply by button, auto-numbered roles, deadline automations) plus DBS background-check tracking.
- Matching & conversations — client and tutor convo automations keep both sides moving and supported.
- Scheduling — Calendly bookings (interviews, calls) flow into monday automatically.
- Automated financial invoicing — the system reads the invoices tutors submit, validates each one against the company's complex, client-specific split-fee arrangements, and automatically queues the right invoices to raise to each client — then syncs to Xero, manages draft/sent status, and chases late payments. What used to be a manual monthly slog runs itself.
- Reporting — live KPI dashboards on a fiscal-year basis, client lifetime value, churn vs. conversion, and per-local-authority breakdowns for the leadership team.
The flow now runs end to end — enquiry, booking, client/tutor CRM, matching, onboarding (role application + DBS), Calendly scheduling, delivery, invoicing, and live reporting. One connected system, where a spreadsheet used to be.
Results
- 95% less time to raise invoices each month — the system reads tutor submissions, validates them against complex split-fee arrangements, and queues each client's invoices automatically.
- 300+ clients and 150+ tutors run day-to-day in one operating system.
- The spreadsheet is gone — replaced by a single source of truth the whole team works from.
- Onboarding & compliance are systematic — tutor applications and DBS checks are tracked, not chased.
- Leadership has live visibility — KPIs, pipeline, lifetime value, and finances in real time.
The real story: growth
The efficiency wins matter — but the real payoff is what they unlocked. With the admin running itself and the system scaling alongside the business, the team has grown conversions by 50% year over year.
And the people doing the work are happier for it. Freed from the spreadsheet and the manual chasing, the team enjoys the job more than ever — confident they're working in a system that keeps growing with them instead of holding them back.
Why it matters
A spreadsheet is where most small businesses start — and where many get stuck. It works until growth turns it into the single point of failure for matching, money, and compliance all at once.
Replacing it with a work operating system doesn't just tidy the admin — it lifts the ceiling. This company now grows conversions 50% a year on the same connected system, with a team that's happier because the software scales with them — free to spend their time where it matters: on great matches and great support.