Setting up and running your training centre
Everything from your first login to your first certificate going out - in the order that works best. Each step shows you exactly where to go and what you should see.
Screens in this guide show Brightwater Training Ltd, a demonstration company - every name, email address and learner is fictional.
Sign in to your portal
Your training centre has its own address - yourname.trainaidsolutions.org - and this is where you and your instructors sign in. Use the admin email and password you registered with. If you've forgotten the password, the Forgot your password? link emails you a reset link that works for an hour.
Meet your dashboard
This is where you land. The big numbers are the ones you actually check: certificates issued this month, seats left on your plan, courses live. The dark Set-up card walks you through the six things worth doing once - and ticks them off by itself as you do them.
Along the top is the navigation. Everything not on the bar lives behind the ··· menu at its end - billing, instructors, import, this guide.
Make it look like your business
Upload your logo and set your two brand colours. These aren't decoration: they're used on every certificate you issue, every email your learners receive, and your own login screen. An SVG logo stays crisp when a certificate is printed.
Your primary colour also tints the portal itself, so the whole thing quietly becomes yours.
Give your instructors their own logins
Instructors get their own account with a restricted view - their own sessions, and the register for each one. They can't see billing, other instructors' sessions, or your company settings.
You set their password here and tell them what it is: no invitation email is sent.
Design your certificate once, reuse it everywhere
Pick a design from the library and make it yours: your logo, your accrediting body, the regulation your course is delivered under. Every certificate issued from a course using this design comes out the same.
Create your first course
A course is a template you'll run many times. The important field is the expiry period: it decides when a learner's certificate runs out, and therefore when they'll be reminded to requalify.
Two tickboxes shape the rest. Specific training requirements adds an assessment rubric for your instructors to mark against. Ask learners for feedback sends the feedback request after the course - untick it and certificates go out as soon as the instructor marks someone passed.
Add the assessment points and feedback questions
Creating the course opens its page, where two builders live. The assessment rubric is the list of competence points your instructors mark each learner against - one row per point, with an optional reference from your qualification specification. Drag the ⇅ handle to put them in the order your assessor works through them.
Feedback questions are what learners answer afterwards. A new course already arrives with a starter set, so this is usually adjusting rather than building. Drag a question by its handle to move it, including into another section; drag a section heading and the whole group moves with it.
Add a short written assessment (optional)
Some awarding bodies ask for a short multiple-choice paper alongside the practical. If yours does, tick Short written assessment in the course details and three settings appear: how many correct answers pass (a number, not a percentage - so a 15-question paper with an 11-to-pass rule is simply 11), whether learners are shown which answers they got wrong, and whether they can sit the paper again if they don't pass. Set these to match your awarding body's rules.
Then type your questions into the builder below - the question, its answer options, and a tick against the correct one. The optional learning outcome box takes the same reference numbers as your assessment rubric, so a wrong answer counts against the right outcome. The questions are yours: type in the paper your awarding body has licensed you to use.
What your learner sees
Nothing else changes for you. When an instructor marks a learner Passed, the paper is emailed to them automatically - one question at a time, on their phone if that's where they open it - and it's marked the moment they submit. Pass, and they're taken straight on to feedback, then their certificate arrives as usual. Fall short, and they see which answers were wrong (if you allow it) and a fresh paper is emailed straight away, with the answer options in a different order.
The feedback request - and the certificate behind it - waits until the paper is passed, so a certificate can never go out ahead of the written result. Every attempt is kept on the learner's record, and each paper sent shows in Email Activity like any other email.
Someone can sit it on paper instead
Not everyone has a phone with them, and the paper is what stands between a learner and their certificate. So it can be sat on paper and the result entered for them.
Mark their practical Passed as usual, then expand them on the register. The Written assessment panel shows where they've got to - and it's worth a look on its own, because it answers "who still owes me a paper?" without opening anything else. Type in the number they got right and press Record result.
From there nothing is different: it's marked against your own pass mark, kept on their record as a real attempt, and the feedback request and certificate follow on behind it. Someone who falls short can sit another paper and you record that the same way.
Put a session in the diary
A session is one delivery of a course: a date, a place, a capacity and an instructor. Capacity draws from your monthly seat allowance, so you only pay for the places you actually open.
Running a course over more than one day? Schedule it on its first day, then open it on the Sessions page and set the Ends date there - the certificate is dated from the last day, because that's when the learner is actually qualified.
Training a company, a school or a council rather than the general public? Name them under Organisation. You can add one here without breaking off to Settings, and the list is tidied later under Company Settings. Choosing a client reveals one more box - Group organiser email, whoever booked the course - and that address does two jobs: it is copied on each learner's renewal reminder, so the employer hears when their staff are due, and it receives the whole group's certificates in one email at the end.
Best set before you add the learners, but nothing is lost if you don't - step 14 shows how to apply a client to a session that has already run, learners and all.
Everything in the diary, in one list
The Sessions page is every session you've run or have coming, filterable by course, instructor or date. Status chips tell you where each one is: Scheduled, Took place, Delivered.
Edit opens a session in place to change its date, capacity, location or instructor. Reducing capacity returns seats to your allowance - though only those drawn in the current allowance month, which the editor warns you about at the time.
Add your learners
Open the session's register and add learners by name and email. Three other ways when that's slow: a bulk CSV import for corporate bookings, the QR code so learners add themselves in the room, and an under-16 tickbox that routes everything to a parent or organiser instead of storing the young person's details.
However a learner gets onto the register, their name can be corrected there - expand them and tap Correct this name. Whatever is stored is what prints on the certificate, and people signing themselves in on a phone don't always type it the way their employer's records need it. Correct it before you certify: an issued certificate keeps the name it was created with.
Every certificate you have ever issued
The Certificates page is your ledger: who was certified, on what, for which organisation, when it expires, and whether it is still valid. Narrow it by course, by client or to a range of dates, and download any certificate again.
Give one company all their certificates
Every learner gets their own certificate by email as soon as they pass. But the person who booked the course usually wants the lot - for a training matrix, an audit file, or a folder on the shared drive - and sending them one at a time is the job this saves.
Filter the ledger to an Organisation and a Download as a zip button appears. It gives you exactly what the table is showing, so narrowing by date first gets you this year's rather than all of them. The button stays hidden until you've filtered something: nobody means to download two thousand certificates at once.
Courses you ran before you started naming clients aren't lost. Open the session on the Sessions page, set its Organisation and organiser, and leave Also assign the learners already on this register ticked. Their certificates then appear under that client however long ago the course ran, and the organiser starts being copied on their renewal reminders - so the employer hears when their staff come due.
Two people are never touched by this: a learner already assigned to a different organisation, and anyone with a contact of their own - which includes every under-16, whose reminders go to a parent or guardian and must keep going there.
Tidying up your records never emails anyone. A course that had already finished when you named its client is treated as history: nobody is sent anything, however many sessions you work through. Only courses that finish after you've named the client send the pack on their own - and if an organiser asks for an old one, the Send now button on that session's register still obliges.
Or let it send itself
Most of the time you won't need to download anything. If the session named a group organiser email, that same zip is sent to them on its own once everybody on the register has been marked - including anyone who didn't pass, because a group isn't finished until it's finished.
It sends once. To send it again - a new HR contact, an email lost in a spam folder - open the session's register and look under Paperwork, where this card names the organiser it is bound for - and, once it has gone, the date it went.
Look someone up
Search by name or email to find anyone you have ever trained, across every course. Each result shows what they took, when, when it expires - and lets you resend their certificate or download it again.
This is the screen you'll open when an employer rings asking whether someone's first aid is still in date.
Edit learner opens their details for correcting. Fix a name or an email address that was mistyped - the usual reason a certificate never arrives - or add an organiser email: whoever booked the training, copied in on that learner's renewal reminders so an employer hears when their staff are due. You can add one long after the course, not just at registration.
Correct a name after the certificate has gone out
Learners who add themselves by QR type their own name, and some type only their first. Correcting it in Edit learner puts the record right, and the public verification page reads the name live, so a scanned QR shows the correction straight away. The certificate they were emailed does not: it was drawn once, with the name that was there at the time.
Reissue with the corrected name redraws it and emails the corrected copy. Save the name first, then press it. It is the same certificate throughout - same verification code, same training and expiry dates - because a mistyped name is not a new qualification, and a new code would strand any copy already filed or scanned.
When a learner cannot fill in the feedback form
Feedback normally releases the certificate: the learner is emailed a form, and answering it sends the certificate out. That assumes everyone has an email address they can actually get into, and some do not - no address of their own, or a work account they can't reach. Until the form is answered they wait, and nothing on the screen moves.
Issue without feedback lets them past it. Their card says the certificate is waiting on feedback, and the button sits beside it. If it needs to go somewhere else - an employer or an office manager - change the address in Edit learner first, because it goes wherever the learner's address points. You are told which address it went to.
What this does not waive is the assessment. On a course with a written paper the button refuses until that paper is passed, on screen or marked from a printed copy. Feedback is an opinion you would like to have; the paper is the evidence the certificate rests on.
See every email - sent and scheduled
Every email the platform sends on your behalf is listed here, with what happened to it. Above the log, Coming up shows the renewal reminders queued over the next few weeks, so you can see the work coming before it arrives.
Renewal reminders go out 6 weeks before a certificate expires, again 4 weeks before, and a final notice 8 weeks after. Each one links the learner back to your own booking page.
Two counts are worth watching. Bounced means the receiving mail server refused it outright, which is nearly always a mistyped address - the count links straight to the ones affected, so you can correct the address on the learner and send it again. Suppressed is different: those were held back on purpose rather than failing, and the page explains why for each one.
Send emails from your own address
By default your learners' emails come from the Train Aid Solutions address. Point them at your own domain instead and everything arrives from you - which matters most when someone hits reply, or when an out-of-office bounces back.
Setting it up means adding two DNS records at whoever hosts your domain. The page gives you exactly what to paste, and checks them for you.
What your learners thought
Star averages per course, and the comments learners actually wrote. Open a course to see the per-question breakdown grouped by section - venue, instructor, materials - so you can see which part of a day is working and which isn't.
Feedback only counts once a learner submits the form, so averages move slowly at first.
Moving across from another system
If you're arriving with years of records elsewhere, bring them all in one go. One row per learner per course; we create any missing courses and sessions, add the learners, and put certificates on their records.
It's all historical, so no emails are sent and none of your monthly seats are used. Nothing is written until you've seen the preview, and rows imported before are recognised and skipped - so running the same file twice can't duplicate anyone.
Your plan, and the seats on it
Every plan includes every feature - the only difference is how many learners a month you can put through. Seats are used when you set capacity on a session, and unused seats don't roll over.
Schools and councils that can't pay by card can request an annual invoice with a PO number instead.
Anyone can verify a certificate
Every certificate carries a verification code and a link. An employer, an auditor or an insurer can check it without an account and without contacting you - they see the learner's name, the course, and whether it is still in date.
These links keep working forever, even if you ever close your account.
