Students & parents

One parent can be linked to many students (siblings), and one student can have more than one parent (split households). Billing always sits on the parent record — that's who the invoice is addressed to and who can log into the parent portal.

From Students → New student, fill in the basics:

• Name, year and exam board — show on invoices and your lesson list.
• Default subject — pre-fills when you book a lesson (and brings its hourly rate with it). You can override per lesson.
• Parent — pick from a dropdown of parents you've already added. Leave empty for now and link later if you need to.
• Notes — private to you, encrypted at rest.

Students can be archived (not deleted) when they stop taking lessons. Archived students don't clutter the main list but stay in the audit trail and on historical invoices.

Every parent has one billing mode at a time. You can switch modes later, but it only affects future lessons — already-invoiced lessons stay as they are.

Parents don't sign up directly — you invite them. Once you do, they get an email with a one-tap login link and can:

• See every invoice you've sent them, with PDF downloads.
• Pay outstanding invoices online via Stripe (when you've connected Stripe).
• Pay for prepay packages you've created for them.
• Pause automated emails if they prefer to log in and check themselves.

You stay in control of everything else — parents can't book, cancel, reschedule, or top up packages themselves. Anything that touches the schedule or sells more hours stays your decision.

A student can be linked to several parent records — useful for split households where both guardians need visibility, or for a paying grandparent who isn't the day-to-day contact.

Among those linked parents, exactly one is the billing parent at any time. All invoices for that student's lessons go to whoever is currently flagged as the billing parent. The others can be kept on file for context but won't receive invoices.