Welcome
CohortLedger is the operations and ESA compliance back office for your microschool. It is software you use, not a network you join. This guide gets you from a blank account to a working dashboard in about fifteen minutes.
1. Create your account
Use a real email you check. The 30-day free trial requires no card. After signup you land on the Overview screen, with a sample school seeded so you can click around before any real data exists. The seeded data lives in a local store and resets when you ask it to.
2. Set up your school
Open the school chip in the sidebar and edit your school name, city, and state. Add the founder name, the lead teacher, and the school address. These appear on invoices and on quarterly state reports, so use the legal name on your W-9.
3. Pick your state
See the next article, Setting up your state, for the full walk-through. The short version: pick the US state your school is registered in. CohortLedger loads that state’s ESA program, payment platform, vendor registration system, and quarterly reporting cadence into your Compliance tab. You do not have to enter any of that by hand.
4. Add your first family
Move to Students and add a family. Each family record has a primary contact, an email, a phone, and one or more students. For each student, pick the ESA program they are enrolled in (or mark Out of pocket for families paying the full tuition directly).
5. Look at the dashboard
Click through Overview, Students, Billing, Compliance, Attendance, Messaging, and Plan. The Overview screen shows the KPIs you care about each week: students enrolled, ESA received and pending this quarter, attendance today, the next compliance deadline with a countdown. Billing shows the quarterly invoice batch with ESA and out-of-pocket splits per family. Compliance is your wedge: every per-state task, every deadline, every dated record.
6. Generate your first invoice batch
When you are ready, generate the quarterly invoice batch from Billing. See Sending your first quarterly invoice for the full walk-through.
Where to go next
Most operators read three more articles after this one: Enrolling families, Marking attendance, and Exporting your audit trail. The rest of the sidebar is reference material you can search when you need it.