The classroom empties and the second job starts
The last lesson ends on Friday at six, the participants say goodbye and go home happy, and in the office everything is still there to do, the register to close, the attendance to count signature by signature, twenty-two certificates to prepare that are identical apart from the name and the date, and the report to put into the format asked for by whoever funded the course
The course lasted two days, the paperwork around it lasts two weeks, and you pay for those two weeks without anyone seeing them
Where the hours go in the course office
- Enrollments that arrive by email, with the form filled in by hand or photographed, and the details have to be retyped into the course management software one by one
- Registers and attendance, the signed sheets come back from the classroom and someone turns them into hours in the system, participant by participant
- Certificates, all alike apart from the name, the date and the total hours, and every time you start again from the template and check that the previous course name has not been left inside
- Reports for whoever funds the course, each one wants its own layout, with the columns arranged its way and the attachments it has decided on
- Documents for the trainers, the CV, the engagement letter, and at the end the record of the hours
- The records of the same participants written out again for every course run, because it is quicker than looking them up
It is the textbook case of the identical document with three fields changed, and it is exactly the kind of work where a careful person loses focus at the fifteenth copy, while for a machine the fifteenth is the same as the first
Examples of what the system can do in here
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some training center, we started recently and we would rather tell you now
- It reads the enrollment forms you get as PDF or Excel, pulls out the personal details, the course chosen and the billing data, then opens the course management software and enters them, the way the person in the office would
- It takes the day's attendance sheet, counts each participant's hours and carries them onto the register in the system, flagging anyone below the threshold you set yourself
- It generates the certificates for a whole course run from your template and the list of those entitled to one, with name, total hours and dates already inside, ready to sign
- It puts the report together in the layout you were given, pulling the numbers out of the business software instead of out of a sheet copied by hand
- It checks the course file before you close it, and tells you what is missing, a trainer's CV, a signature, an hour that does not match between the register and the report
If the course management software you use has no technical integration to offer, that is no problem, the system works on the screens the way an operator would, and it is the house specialty, the same goes for the portals you report on, which it opens and uses with your credentials
What stays with the person in the office
The people stay, the participant who calls because they missed a lesson and asks how to make it up, the trainer to reassure the day before, the classroom to keep running, the company client who wants to understand whether that course is really any use to their staff
The decisions stay yours, whether a participant is entitled to a certificate or not is something you settle with your own rules, and the system carries them out, when a figure does not add up it does not guess it, it stops and leaves the case for you to look at
At the start it is worth keeping it on a short rein, with more confirmations and more checks, then you widen it on the steps you have seen work, this is the way we start
Why the center comes out ahead
The hours that go into certificates and attendance today come back free, and in a small center those hours are the same ones you would need to sell the next course run or to answer someone asking for a quote
There is also the part nobody sees, an hour counted wrong on the register or a total that does not match the report is a problem that surfaces months later, when putting it right costs far more than writing it correctly the first time, and cross-checks line by line are the work a machine does better
You don't have to replace your software, the system uses the business software you already have, and you don't need a large upfront cost, we agree a monthly fee before we begin, that figure stays and you approve every addition yourself
How we begin
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you're talking to the person who does the work
You show me a procedure, a short screen recording with none of your participants' data in it is fine, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the fee before we start, if you want an idea of what it weighs today you can run the numbers here, or write to me and we'll talk it through