Messages let you talk to your Tutors and to the company's Administrators inside TutorCruncher, so everything about your Students' tutoring stays in one place instead of spread across personal email and text messages.

Select Messages in your main menu to see every conversation you are part of. A red dot on the menu item means one of them has something you have not read.

Your Messages list.

Your list has two tabs. Current holds the conversations you are using day to day, and Archived holds any the tutoring company has closed off. Each row shows who is in the conversation, when the last message was sent, and whether it is still Active or has gone Inactive.

Every Job you pay for has its own conversation, holding the Tutors working on it and you. Depending on how the company has set things up, your Students may be in it too.

You also see any conversation your Students are in, even if you are not in it yourself, so you can always see what is being said to them.

An Administrator may also add you to a conversation that is not about a particular Job. You will get an email when that happens.

Select Messages in your main menu and choose a conversation. Type in the box marked Write a message... at the bottom and press Enter to send, or Shift and Enter together to start a new line. A message can be up to 4,000 characters long.

Messages appear for everyone straight away, so there is no need to refresh the page.

To answer a particular message, hover over it and select the reply arrow. Your reply quotes the original, and selecting that quote jumps back to it.

The tick beside a message you have sent tells you how far it has got: one grey tick means sent, two grey ticks mean some people have read it, and two blue ticks mean everybody has. Selecting the tick opens a Read by list naming who has read it.

Sending and replying to messages.

Messages are grouped by day, each with its own date pill. Select that pill to jump to Today, Yesterday, Last week, Last month, The very beginning, or a date you pick from a calendar.

To find a particular message, select the magnifier beside the Send button and type at least three characters. The matching messages are listed newest first, and selecting one takes you straight to it. Press Esc to go back to the conversation.

You will also see short notes in the conversation when somebody is added or removed, when the title or description changes, and when the company locks or archives it.

Tutoring companies usually block two things in messages. If yours does, your message will not send and you will be told why so you can edit it:

If you leave messages unread, you will get an email reminder. Reading them in TutorCruncher within about fifteen minutes means no email is sent at all, and you will never be emailed more than about twice a day about the same conversation.

To stop one conversation emailing you, open it from Messages and untick Email me about new messages in the Details panel. On a narrow screen, select the Details button at the top of the conversation first. You can also use the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, which does exactly the same thing for that one conversation. This only affects your own emails, not anyone else's.

Open a conversation from Messages. The Details panel beside it - or behind the Details button on a narrow screen - shows which Job it belongs to, its description, and everybody in it. The person who started it is marked with a Creator chip, and your own row with a You chip. You cannot rename a conversation, change its description, or change who is in it.

A Job's conversation locks when the Job is finished. An Administrator can also lock or archive any conversation themselves. Either way you can still read everything that was said, but you cannot post, and the reason is shown where the message box was. An archived conversation moves to your Archived tab and stops emailing you.

If the company puts the Job back in progress, or reopens the conversation, it opens again. Nothing is ever deleted.

Every conversation has a Report a Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern button at the top. If something in a conversation worries you, this is the quickest way to tell the company - raising it from inside the conversation records which conversation it came from. Read more about raising a concern here.

Yes. Their Administrators can read every conversation on their account, whether or not they are in it, and can post in it. Treat Messages as a company record rather than a private channel.

Yes. You see every conversation your Students are in, even when you are not part of it yourself.

No. Messages and conversations cannot be deleted, by you or by the company.

Only the tutoring company's Administrators can start one. You are added to the conversations for the Jobs you pay for automatically.

The live connection has dropped. You can still send and receive messages - you just need to refresh the page to see new ones until it comes back.