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How a fast-growing test-prep institute stopped running on spreadsheets and started seeing their students clearly.
Premier SAT & ACT Institute prepares high school students for US university admissions across three centres in Bengaluru. By 2024 they were managing over 400 active students, 12 instructors, and 30+ batches — all tracked in a combination of Excel sheets, WhatsApp groups, and a shared Google Drive folder that nobody fully trusted.
Monday morning. The ops lead opens four spreadsheets, two chat threads, and still can't answer a simple question.
Every Monday, the institute's operations lead spent the first three hours of her week manually pulling together a weekly performance report for the director. She'd collect score sheets from instructors over WhatsApp, cross-reference them against an enrollment spreadsheet, then type everything into a summary doc that was emailed out by noon.
By the time that report reached leadership, it was already a week old. Students who had stopped attending two weeks ago were still marked active. Instructors teaching the same student in different subjects had no way to see each other's notes. And when a parent called asking why their child's score had dropped, nobody could pull up a clear answer without rifling through multiple files.
The institute was growing fast enough that these gaps were starting to cost them students. Two families had switched to competitors after feeling like the institute didn't have a clear handle on their child's progress. Leadership knew they needed to fix this before the next enrollment cycle.
"We were growing every semester but our operations were stuck in 2018. I knew something had to change when I caught myself updating the same student's score in three different places."
— Priya Sharma, Director, Premier SAT & ACT InstituteThey didn't want a vendor. They wanted someone who'd understand the business first.
The institute had spoken to two other development firms before reaching out to us. Both came back within a week with proposals for off-the-shelf LMS platforms with some customisation on top. Neither had asked about the institute's specific workflows, instructor dynamics, or the way parents communicated with staff.
When we first met, we didn't open a laptop. We spent two hours asking questions — how a new student gets enrolled today, what happens when an instructor calls in sick, how a parent typically finds out their child missed a session. The director told us later that was the moment she decided to work with us.
A unified platform for every person in the institute's orbit — admin, instructor, student, parent.
The core insight from discovery was that the institute's data problems weren't really data problems — they were people problems. Information was siloed because the tools each role used didn't talk to each other. So rather than building a better spreadsheet, we built a system around roles and relationships.
01One record per student, owned by everyone
We built a central student profile that every role — admin, instructor, parent — reads from and writes to. No more parallel records. When an instructor logs a session note, the admin sees it. When a parent checks the portal, they see the same score the instructor just entered.
02Batch management that mirrors how the institute actually works
Off-the-shelf tools assume static class rosters. This institute reassigns students between batches based on diagnostic scores. We built the batch system to support fluid reassignment without breaking historical records — a student's full history travels with them.
03AI-assisted learning paths, not AI for its own sake
We integrated OpenAI to generate personalised study recommendations after each mock test. But we scoped it carefully — it surfaces suggestions to the instructor, who reviews and approves before the student sees anything. The AI is a tool for instructors, not a replacement for them.
04A parent portal that answers the call before it's made
The ops lead was fielding 15–20 parent calls a week asking for score updates and schedule changes. We built a read-only parent portal with real-time score visibility, upcoming test dates, and session attendance. The goal was simple: answer the question before the parent has to ask it.
Faster operations were a side effect. The real outcome was visibility.
Three months after launch, the director told us something we didn't expect: the metric she cared most about wasn't the time saved on reporting. It was that, for the first time, she could see which students were at risk of dropping off — and actually do something about it before they left.
Instructors started flagging students proactively through the platform. The ops team went from reactive firefighting to running weekly check-ins based on dashboard data. And two students who would likely have churned were retained after instructors reached out early based on score trend alerts.
Operations centralized
Every piece of student data — enrollment, scores, attendance, notes — lives in one place. The Monday morning spreadsheet ritual is gone.
Instructors are more connected
Instructors teaching the same student in different subjects can now see each other's session notes. Handoffs that used to fall through the cracks don't anymore.
Parents are less anxious
Families check the portal at 10pm instead of calling during office hours. The institute's relationship with parents improved noticeably.
Leadership makes faster calls
The director reviews a live dashboard every morning instead of waiting for a weekly report. Decisions that used to take days now happen in the same meeting.
What we'd do differently if we started today.
We underestimated how much time instructors would need to adapt to logging session notes digitally. Most were used to keeping personal notebooks. In the first two weeks after launch, note completion was around 40%. We ran two short training sessions and redesigned the note entry UI to take under 60 seconds — completion climbed to 85% within a month.
If we were starting over, we'd have run a structured instructor onboarding programme before launch day rather than after. The platform was ready. The habits weren't. That's a lesson we've carried into every project since.
Phase 2 is already in progress.
The institute is expanding to a fourth centre in Pune in Q3 2025. We're currently building multi-location support into the platform — separate batch management per centre with consolidated reporting at the director level. We're also scoping an SMS notification system so parents receive automatic alerts when a session is rescheduled or a score report is ready.
The relationship that started as a four-month project has become an ongoing product partnership.
"What surprised me most wasn't the platform itself — it was that Introsort still felt like they were on our team six months after launch. They've become our technical partner, not just a vendor we hired once."
— Priya Sharma, Director, Premier SAT & ACT InstituteWork with Introsort
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