Configuration considerations

Training companies are complex. While CourseSales.com can handle nearly any business situation we recommend the need to be pragmatic about how you configure the system: complexity, while affording the most flexibility may increase the administration to maintain the system. Consider the modification to existing business processes to simplify the management of courses, a reduction in the variability between courses, and the way you run your business means upscaling is easier and training of new staff is more straight forward.

Some things can’t be automated, perhaps due to variability on a per occasion basis, and may require manual intervention.

While CourseSales.com allows many roles we recommend you keep it simple, using just the observer and the branch is fine. As staff become familiar with the new system and you spot performance enhancements add the invoice contact and course administrator. When running a training company simplicity is king.

Dealing with customers who have not made a decision

Sometimes a customer cancels or is canceled from a course and does not know which course they wish to attend. Usually within CourseSales.com all date-related courses have a specific date and location allocated to them. This means that it is not possible to transfer a student without making an assumption of where, when and what course they are planning to attend. If this gets forgotten they may receive emails that they shouldn’t. The recommended solution is to create a course master with an associated course date that is specifically named as a ‘pending’ or ‘to be allocated’ course. This course can be made private (so it does not appear in the public course listing) and far in the future eg 1/1/2200, so it never expires and is easily searchable ie searching for courses past 1/1/2100 it will always be displayed, and perhaps named (and the course category is named) so it appears at the top of alphabetical lists, eg: ‘1A Pending Students’. This can also be a place to store students who have enquiried by not yet confirmed attendance. When the student does make a decision or it becomes clear where they will be going it is a simple process of transferring the student to the named course.

Advanced features

Advance features could be to set up tailored emails and communications on the process path that are not course specific, eg: email stating ‘Have you decided which course to attend?’ or ‘Thanks for your enquiry, a course is now scheduled in your location - would you like to attend?’

Other similar configurations

Other course masters and course dates can be set up in a similar way to handle different workflows, eg complaints procedures, validating a work health and safety notification, gathering interest for a project training, where the dates are not known yet or may be based on demand, or individuals require approval to attend.

Hiding documents

You can’t delete documents in CourseSales.com - this is helpful for managing audit trails of documents and other items however after doing some testing it can be a distraction. The solution is to create a similar Course Master/Course Date combination that is specifically configured to remove documents from view, the documents are still there however the course is private and completed, perhaps the date is far in the past, eg 1/1/1900, so it can easily be found - it would be the first in a list that filtered with a status ‘completed’. To use this you would just transfer any documents you wished hidden to the course using the appropriate filters, specifically looking for the correct category and making the status ‘completed’.