The admissions desk, without the spreadsheet.

Most admissions teams run on a shared sheet until it breaks. It breaks predictably: two people edit the same row, nobody knows who called whom, and the manager finds out a lead went cold a week after it did.

This keeps what people actually like about a spreadsheet (click a cell, type, move on) and adds the parts a spreadsheet cannot do. Every row has one owner. Every edit is kept with who made it and when. Select a range and bulk update it, then undo if that was wrong. Each user keeps their own column layout, so the manager’s view and the counsellor’s view do not have to be the same view.

Leads come in from a pasted sheet, a CSV, the public intake form on your website, or one at a time. They wait in New leads until somebody owns them.

Before an import is saved you see where every column is going and which rows look like leads you already have. Afterwards it sits in the import history, where the whole batch can be rolled back.

• An inbox for new leadsEverything unallocated sits in one place, so nothing arrives and quietly goes nowhere.
• By hand or across the teamAssign individually, or auto-allocate round robin or by evening out the load. The split is shown first and nothing moves until you commit.
• Segmenting, not stealingA lead can be given to a second counsellor as its own working copy without taking it from the first. Useful when a colleague speaks the language, or the parent calls back and someone else picks up.
• New leads appear without a reloadA counsellor’s list picks up what was just allocated to them within about twenty seconds.

A counsellor opening a list of two hundred leads and deciding who to ring is a counsellor not ringing anybody.

Call mode hands them one lead at a time: overdue call-backs first, then new leads, then follow-ups. Nine outcomes sit on the number keys, Enter saves and brings up the next lead, S skips. The statuses are the ones the work actually has. A switched-off phone is not the same as somebody who said no, and a busy tone is not the same as no answer, so they are filed separately.

Every admissions team has a pile of leads that ring out. Most of them are quietly abandoned by whoever holds them.

Here every try is recorded with its reason. After a minimum number of tries a lead goes to a manager instead of disappearing, and the manager decides: send it back for another go, give it to someone else, park it until a date, or close it. A separate report shows unanswered rates by counsellor, by source and by time of day, so a bad list is not blamed on a person.

The sale is recorded at the moment it happens, in call mode: registration collected, total programme price, batch and duration.

The balance is due a week later by default, and it stays on the counsellor’s own conversions page until it is paid. Revenue against target is shown to the owner only. Managers run the floor; the money is not theirs to see.

• Convert, and record the splitThe full programme price, what was collected up front, and what is still owed. A second sale on the same lead is refused.
• Payment reminders from a templateChase an outstanding balance without writing the same message for the fortieth time.
• Reports a manager will openConversion and revenue by month, a team leaderboard, and a workload view you can reassign directly from.
• Nobody maintains a second sheetThe revenue figure comes from the same rows the counsellors are working, which is the only way it stays true.