Spreadsheet, notebook or app:
what a tutor really needs

When a notebook or spreadsheet is enough

If you teach a handful of students who each pay after every lesson, a notebook or a simple sheet does the job. You write the date, the student and whether they paid, and you check it once a week.

A spreadsheet is also a good choice if you enjoy building your own formulas, need custom reports for your accountant, or share the file with someone else. An app will not replace that flexibility.

The columns a tutoring spreadsheet needs

Use two tabs: one for lessons and one for payments. Keep one row per lesson and one row per payment, never one row per student — that is what lets the sheet calculate balances.

Each student's balance is the sum of their payments minus the sum of their lesson prices, which you can get with a SUMIF on each tab. A positive result means prepaid, a negative one means the student owes you.

• Lessons: date, time, student, duration, price, status (taught / missed / cancelled)
• Payments: date, student, amount, note
• Students: name, price per lesson, contact, balance (calculated)
• Summary: earned this month, still due, cancelled

Where spreadsheets start to break

The trouble is rarely the formulas. It is the daily typing: every weekly lesson has to be entered again, every reschedule edited in two places, and a sheet is awkward to open on a phone between lessons. One missed row and the balance is quietly wrong.

Problems usually show up once you have more than ten or fifteen regular students, prepaid packages, group lessons or students paying in another currency.

• Recurring lessons have to be copied by hand
• A moved or cancelled lesson must be fixed in the schedule and in the payments
• No reminder before a lesson, no glance at today's schedule
• It is easy to break a formula or sort only one column

An honest list of what an app does not do

Squool is for one teacher working alone. It does not send invoices, take payments online, let students book themselves or manage a school with several teachers. If you need custom accounting reports, keep a spreadsheet for that part.

You also cannot import a spreadsheet into Squool. You add students by name and price, enter their current balance as a payment, and turn on weekly repeats. If your lessons are already in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, Squool can bring students and recurring lessons over from there.

Try it side by side

The fairest test is to run both for two weeks. Squool gives 14 days of full access free, no card required, on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Your data stays on your device and in your own iCloud — the developer can't see it — and you can back everything up to a file at any time.