Getting Started Guide for Training Companies

This guide is for training companies that employ trainers and organise events. With Workshop Butler, you can manage events and trainers effectively and receive accurate information about all processes anytime you need.

Before we start, it’s important to emphasise that a training company has full control over the events and trainers’ profiles it creates. As an owner of a training company account, you can create and manage any information about the events organised for your company.

Now, let’s start with creating your first event. It will require some preparations first.

Add a category

In Workshop Butler, each event belongs to a category and a type, and each employed trainer can operate only within the category they have access to. 

Categories help you group events in a logical way and be sure that each trainer can be assigned only to the events they are qualified for. 

As the manager of a training company, you can give and revoke access to types and categories for the trainers.

To add a category, open the dropdown menu in the top right corner, click on Account Settings, and choose Categories in the Event Management section on the left side.

Click on the +Add Category button in the upper part of the Categories section:

You should choose a name for the category and names for one or several types that belong to it. For example, a category could be Agile, and event types might be Scrum Master Course, Agile Foundation Course, etc. 

Do not forget to click the Create button to save changes.

In this section, you can also see the list of categories you already have, edit, and deactivate them.

Connect payments

If you are planning to organize a paid event, you need to connect a payment system to accept payment from attendees.

You can do it from the Account Settings - Payments in the General section on the left.

At the moment, two options are available - Stripe and PayPal. Stripe is in public beta and you can activate it by following this article. PayPal is in closed beta so far. To learn whether it’s possible to activate it for your account, please contact our support team. We will provide you with further instructions.

In this section, you can also specify the sales tax rate in your country and activate EU VAT exemption so that the system could calculate the sales tax for tickets automatically. Read more about sales tax configuration here and about EU VAT exemption here.

Add a trainer

Now it’s time to add a trainer who will actually run the event. You can access the list of trainers from the top menu.

• Click the Add Trainer button
• Enter the name or email address of the trainer (we recommend an email address) to check if the trainer is already in the system. Workshop Butler is different from other platforms. For each trainer, it creates a separate account that belongs to this trainer. It allows trainers to work with different brands, companies, and other trainers, keeping just one account. So there is a chance that the trainer already has an account in Workshop Butler. 

• If not, or you wish to add a new trainer, click the Create New Person button and add their personal data

• Choose the type of working agreement: Fully-managed or Partially-managed. For a fully-managed trainer, you'll have full control over their profile. They are not able to manage events or add attendees. A partially-managed trainer has much more freedom. They are capable of adding events outside your company, they can edit events, etc.
  
  

  

  Important note: if later you decide to change the trainer's working agreement from the Fully-managed to the Partially-managed Trainer or vice versa, you should contact our support team.

• Select categories to which the trainer will have access. This selection allows you to group trainers by their skills. This way, you won't be able to add a trainer to an event of the category this trainer doesn't have skills for.
  
  

  

• After adding a new trainer, Workshop Butler notifies the trainer about the account you created. In the last step, you will be able to edit the message that's to be sent to the newly added trainer.
  

In this section, you will also be able to see the list of all trainers and filter them by categories and activity statuses (active, pending, fired). For fully-managed trainers, you can manage their accounts by clicking on their names and then on the Manage button in their profiles.

If there are too many trainers, use the search bar on the right to find the one you need.

Create an event

With all the preparations done, you can finally move to creating the event itself.

In order to do this, choose the Events section in the top menu and click the Add Event button.

The whole process of creating an event is described in this article. There is a lot of other useful information on this matter in the Event Configuration category of the Help Center.

The external trainers you have added can create events for your training company as well. As the event owner, you will have full control over such an event and can manage any information about it.

The list of all events you and your trainers created will be available in the same tab - Events. From here, you can edit, confirm, and cancel them. 

Configure other settings

Above, we have gone through the main processes available to training companies in Workshop Butler. However, there are many additional settings that can make the event organisation even easier and expand the functionality you have.

• Team

  It can be difficult to manage the account, all events and trainers on it all alone. Adding managers who will help you could be a good idea. They will have the same rights as you except that they cannot delete you because you are the account owner.

  You can manage your team from the Account Settings - Team tab in the General section on the left.

  More detailed information about managing a team can be found in the Team Management articles in the Help Center.

• Certificates

  Certificates are a great way to acknowledge an attendee's efforts and achievements. Not only did they attend an event, but they now have a proof of it on their hands and they can even share it with others to let them know what a useful event they took part in. 

  You can add certificates in the Account Settings - Certificates tab in the Event Management section on the left.

  We have detailed instructions on how to add and create certificate templates, and how to send certificates, in the Certificates category of our Help Center.

• Form customisation

  You might want to customise registration and evaluation forms we offer to request particular information from your attendees. Both options are available in the Account Settings - Event Management section.

  You can find detailed information about customisation in the Evaluation & Registration Forms category in the Help Center.

• Email templates customisation

  WSB sends automated messages to attendees before and after an event. It’s possible to customise templates for these emails, as well as add and schedule your own notifications in the Account Settings - Email Templates.

  You and your company's trainers can customize the content of emails for particular events and send additional emails if needed.

  For more information, check the Emails and Notifications category. 

• Mailchimp and Zapier integrations

  Mailchimp integration can be useful for trainers to stay in touch with attendees and always be sure that attendees will be informed of the latest news. And integrating Zapier will give you access to apps and services it offers. Both options are available in the Account Settings - Integrations section on the left.

• Website integration

  With our website integration, you can keep your clients informed about your schedule, promote upcoming events and trainers. See this article to learn more about the options we offer and use cases.

• Featured events

  If you are using our website integration, you can highlight particular events to draw attention to them. For this, you need to activate the Featured events option in the Settings tab of the Account Settings.

Learn more with Help Center

Help Center contains a lot of useful information on different topics divided by categories. At the beginning of each article, there is a disclaimer indicating the target audience of this article - training company, trainer, or certification brand. Each of these three types has differences in functionality available to them hence the article will be useful only to the audience it was intended for. It also helps you understand if you can delegate a certain action to someone else (for example, trainers) who have access to the corresponding functionality.

If you have not found the answer to your question in the Help Center, you can always contact our support team. You can find the Contact button in the lower right corner of the screen when you are in Account Settings, Login Settings, or on Events Dashboard: