At TutorCruncher, we've decided to give clients a bit more control over how they can book their lessons. When clients log in, they can either decide to choose from a series of preplanned lessons or to request a specific tutor. We've made this easy for users to access, as well as for administrators to set up. We'll be going into these two options in a little more detail, as well as successfully getting these set up on the platform.

There are a few things to take into account when making lessons bookable for your clients. The first is that the 'Public Job' label has been applied to the main job page and that those lessons are planned into the future with available spaces. If you aren't too sure about what criteria a lesson would need to be bookable, then you can check out our guide here on getting that setup. When a client decides to book a lesson, they can choose a particular job, or they can select from all of the bookable lessons that are available. This can be accessed from the 'Book a lesson' tab in the panel on the left-hand side of a clients log in.

Once a client has assigned a student to a lesson, they will then be sent an email confirming this. Don't worry though, as you have full control over what is included in the body of text that's included in that email. We have a selection of email definitions that will cover this, so you can edit these by going to Settings > Communication > Email Definitions.

Those lessons will then appear in your user's calendar, and they can access the lesson details page from there, or request to cancel that lesson if needs be. You can also set the default lesson duration by going to Settings > People & Activity > Activity, and setting the duration in minutes there.

We have now given clients the option to choose to request a tutor from your agency within TutorCruncher. This is similar to how the Tutor Listing works on Socket, but this would now be from within the platform. In order to get this setup, you will first need to make a few adjustments to your system settings. If you navigate to Settings > People & Activity, there is a section there for 'Clients Booking Lessons & Tutors'. Here, you'll need to enable the option for 'Clients Book Public Tutors'.

Once that's enabled, the next step is to adjust your tutor's profiles so that they can be displayed to your clients. You will need to apply the label for 'Public Profile', as well as setting their availability. If you have made any adjustments to tutors profiles and want them to be updated, then you will need to approve & refresh those public profiles.

When a client is logged in, they will be able to choose a tutor from the 'Book a lesson' tab in the panel on the left-hand side of their profile. All of the tutors that have public profiles with your agency will be displayed to the client. From here, they can filter by tutors who teach specific subjects, or show what weeks a tutor is available to teach. It's important to note though, that a tutor or admin would need to set a tutors availability in order for a client to be able to request them.

From here, clients will be able to view the availability of a tutor and choose a time that suits them. On the lesson booking form, they will be given an option to choose a subject and a teaching level. This will help ensure that clients choose an appropriate tutor that would provide the right tuition for their student.

Once booked, that lesson will then appear in the client's calendar. This makes it easy for users to view those lesson details at a glance, as well as giving them the option of cancelling a lesson from here as well.

When a client makes a request for a tutor, administrators, as well as the tutor themselves, would receive this notification. You can either edit or enable/disable the definition for 'Client booked lesson notification' by going to Settings > Communication > Email Definitions. This is quite useful though, as a job will automatically be created for that client's request with the tutor attached to it. It's then up to either an admin or the tutor to accept or decline that request. Clients would then be kept up to speed if the lesson request was accepted or declined via an email notification.