Most online tutors do not lose money on the lessons they teach. They lose it on the four things that happen around the lessons — and none of the planners on the market have a page for any of them.

I have taught English online for years. Every September I bought a new planner, and every November I stopped using it. Not because I am disorganised, but because the planners were built by people who have never had a student cancel at nine in the evening.

Here is what actually goes wrong, and the four pages that fix it.

1. The student who cancels “occasionally”

One student who cancels once a month is not an occasional canceller. That is nine to twelve lessons a year. At €20 an hour, that is €200–240 gone from a single student — and you will never notice, because each individual cancellation feels reasonable.

You cannot have the conversation about a cancellation policy from memory. You need a page with dates on it. Once you have six lines written down, the conversation becomes easy, because it stops being about a feeling and starts being about a fact.

2. The enquiry you meant to answer on Tuesday

Most tutors answer enquiries from their inbox and never write them down. That means two things get lost. The first is the enquiry itself — the one you meant to reply to and did not. The second is more expensive: you never learn which source actually brings you students.

Write down every enquiry, including the ones that go nowhere. After twenty of them, the pattern is undeniable: one source is worth your time, one is a polite waste of it, and you have probably been putting your effort into the wrong one.

3. The student who has stopped improving

Every tutor has one. They turn up, they are pleasant, they pay on time, and they have been making the same mistake since February.

The fix is not more material. It is an error log: five recurring mistakes per student, written down, and revisited. Five — not fifty. And here is the rule that makes it work: if a line is still there after three months, it is not a mistake any more. It is a habit, and it needs a different lesson, not another correction.

Most tutors have never once written down what a specific student keeps getting wrong. It is the single highest-value page in any tutoring planner, and no commercial planner has it.

4. The one who has not paid since August

Tick the payment column on the day, not at the end of the month. The conversation you are avoiding gets harder every week you leave it, and by week six it is awkward enough that most tutors quietly write the money off.

A single attendance-and-payment grid, filled in as you go, removes the whole problem. It also turns your tax return from a lost weekend into twenty minutes.

Why a planner and not a spreadsheet

Because you will not open the spreadsheet. A tutoring week is not a desk job — it is fifty minutes here, a gap, then two back-to-back, then an evening lesson. The only thing that survives that rhythm is something already open on the table next to you, that takes ten seconds to fill in between calls.

That is also why every page here is undated. A dated planner is worthless by March and throws away your money every January. Print what you need, when you need it.

The full thing

The Tutor’s Planner is thirty pages built around a real tutoring week: planning the year and the term, weekly timetables, lesson plans for one-to-one and group, student profiles and progress logs, attendance and payment, income by month and by year, expenses, a ready invoice page, and the four business pages above. A4 and US Letter, instant download, €5.99.

Written by a working English teacher who got tired of planners designed by people who have never taught a lesson.