Anyone choosing management software for a language school, a course centre or a study travel agency runs into a vocabulary of its own — part travel business, part education, part software price list. This glossary defines the 20 terms that actually come up in demos, quotes and contracts, in alphabetical order. Each definition stands on its own; the sentences after it explain why the term matters in practice.
Agency commission
An agency commission is the fee a language school pays to an education agency for a booking the agency brought in — usually a percentage of the course price, often tiered by agency or type of service. Management software models this with commission categories and payment terms, so commission invoices and credit notes are generated from the bookings themselves instead of from a separate spreadsheet.
Agent portal
An agent portal is a dedicated online login through which education agencies create bookings for their students, follow the status of ongoing cases and download documents — without every question travelling by e-mail. For schools with agency business it replaces the back-and-forth of forms and makes commission settlement transparent, because both sides look at the same data. When comparing prices, check whether agent logins count as paid users or are free.
Booking vs. registration
A booking is the binding reservation of a service package in the study travel business — typically course, accommodation, transfer and insurance with arrival and departure dates; a registration is the sign-up for a course in local classroom operations. The distinction is more than semantics: a booking carries occupancy, commission and travel documents behind it, a registration carries a course place, a participant list and a certificate. Both are, in turn, different from the non-binding enquiry.
Consolidated invoice
A consolidated invoice combines several bookings or services into a single invoice document — typically for agencies that place many students, or for corporate clients sending employees to courses. It cuts document volume and reconciliation effort on both sides, but requires the system to keep each line item cleanly linked to its underlying booking.
CRICOS / PRISMS
CRICOS is the Australian register of education providers allowed to teach international students; PRISMS is the associated government reporting system through which providers report course enrolments and terminations to the authorities. Both only concern schools with Australian reporting obligations — providers operating there need software that supports these reports, while for European schools the pair of terms plays no role.
Data processing agreement (DPA)
A data processing agreement (DPA, German: AVV) is the contract required by Art. 28 GDPR between a school and every service provider that processes personal data on its behalf — first and foremost its management software. It defines where the data lives, who the sub-processors are and what applies in the event of a data breach. A serious vendor provides the DPA and a written security overview on request — how this looks at Fidelo is documented on the security page.
Enquiry
An enquiry is the non-binding first contact from a prospective student before a booking — what general CRM language calls a “lead”. Keeping enquiries and bookings separate is a core function of language school software: an enquiry turns into a quote and a follow-up date, and only with confirmation does it become a booking with an invoice and occupancy behind it.
Homestay matching
Homestay matching is the assignment of students to host families based on stored criteria — allergies, pets, diet, smoking household, distance to school. Software filters automatically: providers whose attributes do not match a student’s requirements never appear in the shortlist. Combined with occupancy periods, this prevents the two classic manual-process failures: the double booking and the cat in the allergic student’s household.
LMS vs. management software
An LMS (learning management system, e.g. Moodle) organises the learning — course content, assignments, progress; management software organises the business — enquiries, bookings, invoices, accommodation, commissions. The two do not compete, they complement each other: the management system hands booking and class data to the LMS, and the LMS delivers the teaching. Buying an LMS while expecting a management system (or vice versa) is a mistake usually discovered only after go-live.
Occupancy plan
An occupancy plan shows which accommodation places — rooms with host families, beds in residences — are occupied, reserved or free in which period. Because study travel bookings carry arrival and departure dates, the plan directly answers where capacity remains in a busy summer week and where an overbooking is looming.
OTA model (booking fee)
The OTA model is a software pricing model in which the vendor earns per booking or as a percentage of revenue — named after the online travel agencies that work this way. For the school it means the software bill grows with every strong season. The opposite model is a fixed price per administrative user, where the bill stays independent of booking volume.
Payment reconciliation
Payment reconciliation is the matching of incoming payments — bank transfers, card payments, payments through providers such as Flywire — to the open invoices and bookings they belong to. Done manually, it is one of the biggest time sinks in a school office, because references are missing, amounts differ and agencies pay in bulk. How to approach it systematically is covered in our guide to payment reconciliation in the language school.
Placement test
A placement test determines a participant’s language level before the course starts, so they end up in the right class. In management software it is ideally an online form whose result lands directly on the student record and feeds class planning — instead of sitting in an inbox as a PDF.
Role-based permissions
Role-based permissions define which team members may see and edit which data — the accommodation team sees the health notes intended for the host family, accounting sees the payments, and not the other way round. Under data protection law they are more than a convenience: special-category data such as allergies must not be visible to everyone on the team, and permissions are the tool that enforces this technically.
Self-service trial vs. guided demo
A self-service trial and a guided demo are the two common ways to evaluate software before buying: in a trial you register yourself and explore an empty system; in a guided demo the vendor walks you through the system along your own workflows in a scheduled call. The more configurable a product is — price lists, commission rules, document templates — the more likely the vendor relies on the demo, because an unconfigured system says little about day-to-day use. A fair middle ground is a demo with a test import of your own data.
Student portal
A student portal (or participant app) is the dedicated login for course participants, holding their timetable, documents, invoices and course information. It moves routine questions — “When is my class? Where is my confirmation?” — from the front desk into self-service, and with many vendors it is free for students because only administrative users count as licences.
System of record
The system of record is the leading system that holds the authoritative state of the data — the single source every other tool follows. For a language school this means, in practice: bookings, payments and occupancy live in the management system, and the newsletter tool, the accounting package and the LMS take their data from there — not the other way round, and not in five parallel spreadsheets with five versions of the truth.
Test import
A test import is a trial import of your existing data — students, bookings, agencies — into a new system before the purchase decision. It reveals two things no demo can: how well your data structurally fits the new system, and how large the migration effort will really be. If you are switching, ask for one; a vendor who offers it has little to hide from your actual data.
Tiered per-user pricing
Tiered per-user pricing is a model in which the price per administrative user drops in steps as the number of users grows — the eleventh licence costs less than the first. What matters is who counts as a user: in fair models only the back-office team, while student, teacher and agent logins stay free. You can play through the maths with the calculator on our pricing page.
White-label app
A white-label app is an app or portal that appears under the school’s own name and design rather than the software vendor’s brand. For the school, the outward appearance is the point: students and agencies see the school, not its software supplier. Technically it remains the same product — what should be checked is which elements can actually be customised (logo, colours, domain) and at what cost.