Principia Education is a McLean-based education firm offering college consulting, tutoring, and test prep — SAT, ACT, TJ, SSAT, and HSPT — to families across Northern Virginia and beyond. Their team includes former admissions officers, professional writers, and subject specialists, working with students from middle school through the college application process.
Principia’s engagements stretch across years and across multiple service lines per family. Group classes run on a seasonal calendar; private tutoring runs on instructor schedules. Both flows share the same data, the same families, and the same standard for getting things right.
Principia’s onboarding worked, but it ran on the team — not on a system. Every new student meant moving information by hand: downloading and uploading files, organizing folders in Google Drive, mirroring records in Asana, and updating Teachworks. At the start of each season, group class setup multiplied that work across every class on the calendar.
Two flows compounded the load. Group classes needed Jotforms and Drive folders generated for every class on the seasonal calendar. Private tutoring needed booking, payment, calendar entry, and Teachworks updates handled across different tools with no connecting layer. New-family versus returning-family logic was obvious to a human reviewing a submission, but invisible to the systems behind the scenes.
The team needed the systems to talk to each other so they could spend time on students, not on file management.
Streamline built two connected automation systems on n8n — one for group classes, one for private tutoring — anchored by Jotform as the trigger and Teachworks as the system of record. The build was designed to be self-sustaining: the start-of-season work that used to consume the team is now kicked off by the team filling out a single internal form.
Group Class onboarding — Pulls class dates from Teachworks, generates Jotforms and a Google Drive folder per class from templates, and routes everything to the right staff for posting on the Principia site.
Customer enrollment — When a family submits a class form and pays, automations check whether the family is new or returning, route by payment method, create the student folder, and add the student to the class roster.
Private Tutoring booking — A separate enrollment flow books sessions on the instructor’s calendar and writes the student into Teachworks automatically.
Duplicate prevention — Before generating new forms, the system checks Jotform for existing ones tied to the same class — so the start of every season runs cleanly without manual cleanup.
Internal coordination — Asana, Gmail, Slack, and Edison are wired into the same flows so notifications, task creation, and status updates reach the right people without anyone copying information between tools.
The result is a system that effectively builds itself at the start of each season. Class dates go into Teachworks, an internal n8n form pulls those dates, the system generates the right Jotforms and Google Drive folders, and staff post the resulting form links on the Principia site. From there, every customer submission moves through the rest of the flow on its own.
The sales cycle that used to run more than three weeks now closes in under a day. Manual onboarding work is down roughly 90%, and errors from manual handling are gone because the data only enters the system once, on the form. With the same staff, Principia moves more students through the funnel without the start of each season turning into a logistics project.
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