Welcome to LessonLoop. There’s no long install and nothing to configure up front — you can be teaching and billing from it within an afternoon. Here’s a calm, in-order walkthrough of your first week, with a link to the full guide at each step.
Day 1 — Sign up and get your bearings
When you sign up you’re signed straight in — there’s no email confirmation to click and nothing to wait for. A welcome email follows shortly afterwards for your records.
You’ll land in the onboarding wizard first — a short, five-step run that sets up the essentials (your studio name, what you teach, your time zone). It takes a couple of minutes. Finish it and you arrive in the staff app proper.
Spend a moment getting oriented. Everything hangs off the left sidebar; if you’re ever lost, the navigation map shows where each feature lives.
Day 1–2 — Work the Setup checklist
Your home base is the Today page (the first item in the sidebar). Near the top you’ll find the guided Setup checklist — a card that walks you through the remaining bits in a sensible order: connecting card payments, adding your first students, and so on. Work through it at your own pace; it tidies itself away once you’re done.
Good to know The Setup checklist has no menu item of its own — it lives on the Today page and quietly retires itself when setup is complete. The fuller version of this is in Set up your studio.
Day 2–3 — Add students and book lessons
| Step | Where it lives |
|---|---|
| Add students | Students in the sidebar (or import a list in bulk) |
| Book your first lessons | Calendar — click a slot, or drag to reschedule |
| Take attendance | The “Take attendance” button on the Calendar |
Add a few students by hand, or bring your whole roster across at once — the importer lives at Settings → Advanced → Data import. Then open the Calendar and book your first lessons. This is the heart of LessonLoop: lessons on the Calendar feed everything that follows.
Day 4–5 — Run your first billing
Once lessons are on the Calendar, you’re ready to invoice. There are two ways: a billing run generates invoices for everyone in one go from their lessons, or New invoice raises a single one-off invoice by hand. For your first bulk billing, use a run.
- Open Billing & Finance → Billing runs in the sidebar.
- Start a run and choose how to bill — by Term, or by Custom dates (for a single month, set a custom range covering that month).
- Review the draft invoices, then send. The full walkthrough — including the New invoice one-off path — is in Create and send invoices.
If you connected card payments during setup, every invoice you send gains a Pay button so families can pay online and the money lands in your own bank.
That’s a complete first week — signed up, set up, teaching, and getting paid. Anything you’re unsure about, your AI assistant is in the top bar to help.
Was this out of date or unclear? Tell us — we keep these guides matched to the live app.