Chess academy glossary

This glossary defines the operator-side vocabulary of running a chess academy: the operations terms, federation and admin requirements, and product concepts that come up while scheduling batches, tracking fees, and reporting to parents. It sets aside pure player-improvement terms and keeps to the language academy owners, coaches, and parents actually use day to day. Each definition below is extractive by design: a short, standalone answer, not a pitch.

Every term links up to a full guide on the blog, so once you have the definition you can read the how and the why.

Academy operations

Batches, make-up classes, retention, demo classes, and the other words academy owners run their week on.

Attendance register

An attendance register is chess academy software's per-session record of each student's status (present, absent, or late), the reason for any absence, who marked it and when, and what the mark triggered, such as a make-up credit or a coach follow-up. It replaces a paper sign-in sheet with a record built for reading patterns, not just for logging a mark.

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Batch

A batch is the fixed group of students an academy teaches together in one weekly slot, formed by banding rating range first and age second so every lesson lands for the whole group. Batch size and rating spread set the ceiling for how many students one coach can genuinely teach inside a single session.

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Coach load

Coach load is the total weekly teaching commitment one coach carries: every batch assigned to them, plus the preparation, game review, and parent-communication time each session pulls behind it. Chess academy software tracks coach load per coach so a new batch, a mid-term promotion, or a fresh enrolment never quietly pushes one coach past a sustainable weekly ceiling.

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Demo class

A demo class is a single trial session a chess academy offers a prospective student before enrollment, letting the family judge the coach and batch fit before committing to a paid seat. Academy software logs each demo's outcome (enrolled, declined, or pending) as the first stage of the enrollment funnel, since an unfollowed demo quietly becomes a lost lead.

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Enrollment funnel

An enrollment funnel is the tracked sequence a prospective student moves through before becoming a paying, recurring student: initial enquiry, a booked demo class, an attended demo class, an active fee mandate, and the first collected payment. Chess academy software treats each stage as a status on a lead record, not a guess an owner carries in memory.

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Fee mandate

A fee mandate is the recurring-payment authorization a parent grants once, most commonly a UPI AutoPay mandate through Razorpay or a Stripe subscription outside India, so a chess academy's monthly fee debits automatically each cycle up to the approved amount. The mandate replaces manual chasing with a standing authorization the family can cancel or adjust at any time.

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Make-up credit

A make-up credit is a ledger entry chess academy software creates when a student misses a class under an absence type the written policy compensates, such as illness with notice or an academy-cancelled session. It records the student, the missed class, the date earned, and an expiry date, and redeems only in a designated make-up slot, never a regular batch.

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Progress report

A progress report is the monthly document a chess academy sends parents showing a student's evidence, narrative, and next step: attendance from the register, games and rating movement from synced Lichess or Chess.com history, an engine-checked evidence moment, three or four sentences of coach narrative, and one concrete focus for the coming month.

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Retention rate

Retention rate is the share of students enrolled in a chess academy at the start of a term who are still enrolled at the start of the next term, tracked batch by batch rather than academy-wide. Academy owners get it by dividing continuing students by starting enrollment; ChessCore surfaces the count so a term-over-term dip is visible early.

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Federation and admin

FIDE IDs, federation registration, rating floors, and the paperwork side of a rated academy.

Terms in this category are in our publishing queue. Browse the blog in the meantime.

Product concepts

Approval queues, guardian portals, engine analysis, and the concepts coaching software is built from.

Approval queue

An approval queue is a screen in chess academy software where every AI-drafted parent message, progress report, or game review summary waits for a named coach to read, edit, and approve before it sends. Nothing leaves the queue automatically, which keeps the coach as the author of record for every message a family receives.

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Game review queue

A game review queue is the screen in ChessCore where a batch's uploaded games sit after the Stockfish pre-scan, each one flagged with its two or three biggest eval swings, waiting for the coach to open it during a student's 15-minute review slot. The queue holds unreviewed games, not sent messages, and clears as each slot is worked through.

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Guardian portal

A guardian portal is the private, per-family login area in chess academy software where each parent sees only their own child's attendance, fees, receipts, and progress reports. Records are one-to-one and permanent, unlike a shared WhatsApp group, so a family can find last term's receipt or a coach's note months later without scrolling.

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Parent update

A parent update is a message about an individual student, a progress recap, fee receipt, attendance note, or make-up class notice, delivered to that family's own WhatsApp thread rather than a batch group. In ChessCore, AI drafts the update from database records and a coach approves it before it sends; nothing reaches a parent automatically.

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Rating sync

Rating sync is the automated process by which chess academy software pulls a student's online rating and game history from a linked platform account into their academy record. In ChessCore, Lichess accounts sync automatically through Lichess's open API, while Chess.com accounts import read-only, so every student's rating trend updates without a coach re-entering numbers by hand.

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Game terms coaches use

Chess terms with a genuine operator angle: only where a coach or academy owner needs the word to run the business.

Terms in this category are in our publishing queue. Browse the blog in the meantime.