Setting up with Ida
A new studio is set up by chatting with Ida. Setup opens full screen with your studio's live preview beside the chat: Ida asks what it needs (a few questions at a time, as tappable answers), brings in your families from your old system or a spreadsheet, and builds your levels, classes, tuition, billing, forms, team and payments with you. Nothing changes until you apply it: every change arrives as a card listing exactly what will be created, which you can trim line by line, send back with a note, or apply — and undo afterwards.
Setup is for getting your studio live, and it ends when you go live. Ida runs a go-live check (every must-have in place, plus a dry run of your first billing run), and once you say go, your studio is live.
A head start from your website
Some studios don't start from a blank page. When the Ida team sets your studio up with you, Ida reads your website and drafts your look, your levels, your teachers, your weekly classes and your tuition plans before you first sign in. Whatever you settled together on your call arrives confirmed; the rest is saved as a draft for you to check.
A drafted section shows on your setup checklist as 'Drafted from your website' and stays in progress even though everything is already in place — click or tap it and Ida opens that section with you, so you can fix anything that's off and confirm the rest. Ida also brings each draft up on its own before go-live, so your studio never opens on details you haven't checked.
Leave and come back anytime
You can jump to the dashboard at any point — the conversation is saved, and it picks up on any device, web or the iPhone app. While your studio isn't live yet, a 'Continue setup with Ida' card on the dashboard shows how ready you are and takes you straight back.
After you go live
Going live is the end of setup. You get a short celebration, and from then on you ask Ida from any page: the Ida AI panel on the web, the Ida screen in the app. It is the same Ida with the same change cards, so a new season's classes, a price change, a trial offer or a late roster are one message away wherever you are.
Opening the setup page after that takes you to your dashboard with the Ida panel open. Your setup conversation stays in Ida's conversation history as 'Studio setup', for reference.
Studios that were already running when they first opened Ida (families on the roster and payments on) count as live from the start and never see setup questions.