Sathuranga Chanakyan Chess Academy

1. 01

   Enrolment and daily operations

   Admin sets up programs, batches and coaches; students enrol into a batch. Classes generate automatically from each batch's weekly schedule instead of being typed in one at a time.

2. 02

   Attendance that cannot be skipped

   A coach cannot mark a class complete until attendance is recorded for every enrolled student. That one constraint is what makes every payroll and attendance number downstream trustworthy.

3. 03

   Fees, invoicing and a class-credit ledger

   Parents pay through Razorpay or the admin records cash. Either way a real invoice is raised in the academy's own Zoho Books account, on their template and their tax settings.

4. 04

   Eight credits a month, tracked

   Each paid month grants 8 class credits and each class held consumes one. Joining mid-month bills pro rata on the class days actually remaining. Every credit added or consumed is a row with a reason and a running balance, so a disputed fee is traced instead of argued about.

5. 05

   Missed classes

   Miss an online class and that session's recording unlocks for that student. Miss an offline one and a compensation class is scheduled and tracked to completion. Neither costs the family a credit — the academy promises eight classes a month and this is how that promise is kept without a conversation.

6. 06

   Coach payroll

   Part-timers are paid per class at a rate set on the batch, so the same coach earns one amount for a beginner group and another for an advanced one-to-one. Pay follows whoever actually taught the class, so a substitute is paid correctly.

7. 07

   Automated homework checking

   Students link their Lichess username. The system snapshots their lifetime puzzle count at the moment homework is assigned, so progress is an exact difference rather than an estimate. A coach checks a whole batch in one click instead of opening eight browser tabs.

8. 08

   Monthly reports parents read

   Attendance, homework completion, rating change with a six-month chart, results for the month, puzzles practised, concepts covered, and the coach's own written observations. Prints to a clean PDF with the academy's logo. Once published, a report is frozen — the copy a parent read never silently changes.

9. 09

   Interactive curriculum

   A tree rather than a checklist: program, module, concept, item. An item is theory to read, a puzzle to play on a real board, or homework. Coaches author it themselves, including importing an existing Lichess study.

10. 10

    A real analysis board

    Not a picture of a board. Full variation trees, clickable sidelines, free exploration of alternative moves, and a chess engine running in the browser with an evaluation bar and best-move arrows.

11. 11

    Payroll behind a permission

    Salary access sits behind a per-account permission read fresh from the database on every request. The academy can hand the admin login to a manager who runs the entire operation without ever seeing what coaches are paid.

12. 12

    The public side

    Landing site, programs, paid event registration, a merchandise store with checkout and automatic invoicing, a gallery, and a free-demo form that pushes each lead into the CRM and into an admin screen where a coach and a call link are assigned and both sides emailed.

How it holds together

Decisions worth defending in a review, rather than a list of technologies.

• Tenant isolation at the database layer

  Every scoped table carries an academy id, and isolation is applied by an ORM-level filter driven from the authenticated user's token — not by remembering to add a WHERE clause to each query. Missing tenant context throws rather than falling through to “return everything”.

• Money paths that cannot lose a payment

  Invoicing runs after the payment transaction commits, on a background thread, so a slow or broken accounting API can never delay or fail a customer's checkout. It is idempotent at two levels — an in-transaction check and a database constraint — so a retry cannot produce a duplicate invoice.

• Failures that surface instead of vanishing

  A failed invoice is recorded against the order and retryable from the admin screen rather than disappearing into a log file. Payments sync both ways: Razorpay updates our records, a webhook covers payments entered directly in the accounting system, and a scheduled reconciliation job catches anything a dropped webhook missed.

• Nothing trusted from the browser

  Payment signatures are verified server-side. No amount and no order status is ever taken on the client's word.

• One source of truth

  Our database is authoritative and the accounting system mirrors it. Nothing a family experiences ever waits on an external API.

• Hardened for production

  Health and readiness endpoints, per-IP rate limiting, structured logging with request trace IDs, automated database backups, and startup validation that refuses to boot in production if a critical configuration value is missing.

• 164 tests, green before every commit

  Plus live end-to-end verification against a real test accounting organisation before anything ships.

See it

The public side is at sathurangachanakyan.com — open it. The screens below are the same build running on our own development environment, with seeded batches and coaches, so no family's name or payment appears on a public page. For the live system, ask on WhatsApp and we will walk you through it on a call.