For Australian education and training providers
Education software for providers where the LMS, the CRM and the billing system disagree about the same student.
For RTOs, CPD providers, professional-development companies and LMS operators where Moodle or Canvas holds the enrolment, HubSpot or Salesforce holds the renewal conversation, Xero or Stripe holds the payment, and the regulator-shaped evidence trail lives in a spreadsheet rebuilt every audit cycle. We build the database underneath, so the learner, the activity, the payment and the evidence all read from one source instead of four.
What we hear from operations and compliance leads
Operations leads and compliance partners describe the same pattern at every Australian education provider we sit down with. None of it is the LMS's fault on its own. It is what happens when the LMS was built to deliver a course, the CRM was built to close a sale, and the billing system was built to issue an invoice. The work that holds the provider together (the evidence trail, the reconciliation, the regulator report) ends up in someone's head, in a spreadsheet, or in a folder of PDFs that travels by email.
- Learner data lives in three systems that disagree about the same student. The LMS holds enrolments and progress. The CRM holds the sales conversation and the renewal. The billing system holds the invoice. Each one has a record for the same person, none of them share an ID the others trust, and the admin team reconciles the three of them by hand each week. When a student calls in to dispute a payment or a completion record, somebody opens three browser tabs.
- Enrolment and payment reconciliation is a manual weekly job. A learner signs up, pays, and the LMS gives them access. The payment lands in Stripe or in Xero, the enrolment lands in the LMS, and nothing connects the two. Refunds, deferrals, payment plans and corporate-account enrolments all break the simple path. Each Monday somebody runs an export, matches the rows by email address, and chases the mismatches.
- Reporting to the regulator runs on an export, a spreadsheet and a memory. AVETMISS for RTOs, AHPRA-shaped CPD evidence for allied health, FAAA categories for financial advisers, ASIC-licensee aggregate reports. None of the off-the-shelf platforms model these natively. The admin team exports a CSV, maps categories by hand in Excel, and produces the report the regulator wants. When the regulator changes the category mapping, the spreadsheet changes too, and the institutional knowledge sits with one person.
- Content versioning across cohorts is unmanaged. A course gets updated mid-year. The new cohort sees the new version. The old cohort is partway through the old version and cannot be migrated without losing their progress. Two versions of the assessment are now live, the marking rubric depends on which version the learner started under, and the audit trail of which learner saw which version exists only in the build history of the LMS.
- Formal training and on-the-job evidence never join up. The LMS records that the learner completed the course. The on-the-job supervision log lives in a Google Doc. The reflective-practice statement sits in a PDF emailed to the assessor. The regulator wants the three of them together as one evidence trail per practitioner, and the admin team reassembles that trail by hand every audit cycle. Nobody has built the database that holds the learner, the activity, the evidence and the regulator category in one place.
None of these get fixed by switching LMS platforms. They get fixed by deciding which system owns which field and putting a real database underneath that captures the truth across the enrolment, the assessment, the evidence and the payment. That is the work we do. When the evidence trail and the regulator report are the load-bearing piece, the work sits closer to custom LMS development than to a platform swap, and the Moodle vs Canvas vs custom LMS comparison for AHPRA CPD walks through when each one is the right call. If the existing Moodle, Canvas or LearnDash stack stays and the reconciliation is the problem, our integration approach covers it, or browse our full custom-software services for the broader picture.
Tools we work with
Learning management platforms
Moodle, Canvas, LearnDash, custom LMS
The platform the learners log into, plus the content standards your authors publish to. Moodle and Canvas are the institutional incumbents; LearnDash sits under most WordPress-based training sites; a custom LMS is the right call when the regulator-shaped evidence trail outgrows the off-the-shelf model. SCORM 1.2/2004 and xAPI carry the activity stream from Articulate, Storyline or H5P; we wire them into the database underneath so launch events land as structured evidence rather than a player event the regulator cannot read.
Evidence trail and supervision logs
Practitioner evidence, longitudinal CPD record
The trail the regulator wants, one practitioner at a time. We model the LMS completion record, the supervisor sign-off, the reflective-practice statement and the regulator category mapping as first-class entities in one database. Each evidence piece carries its practitioner, its activity, its category and its date; the longitudinal CPD record assembles itself, and the audit response runs from a query instead of a folder of PDFs and a Google Doc.
CRM and student records
HubSpot, Salesforce, the custom student record
The CRM holds the sales conversation. The student record holds the learning history. We connect the two so the renewal conversation knows what the learner finished, the learning history knows which corporate account paid for the seat, and the email that lands on Monday morning is informed by both. The database underneath is the source of truth; the CRM and the LMS are views into it.
Billing and payments
Xero, Stripe, QuickBooks
Course fees, payment plans, corporate invoices, refunds and deferrals all need to reconcile with the enrolment record automatically. We build the integration that ties the Stripe charge or the Xero invoice to the LMS enrolment so the weekly reconciliation export stops being a weekly job. Payment plans and corporate-seat allocations get modelled as first-class entities instead of edge cases.
Regulator and compliance
AVETMISS, AHPRA CPD, FAAA, ASIC licensee
The reporting shape the regulator actually asks for. AVETMISS quarterly submissions for RTOs. CPD evidence by practitioner registration number for AHPRA, FAAA and CPA Australia. Licensee-aggregate reports for ASIC-licensed training. We build the data model that knows about practitioners, registration numbers, categories and trienniums from day one, so the report runs from a database query instead of a quarterly Excel rebuild.
The plumbing
The custom layer
Most of the value sits in the entities the LMS and the CRM do not model in the shape your business runs them. Cohort-versioned assessments, corporate-account seat allocations, payment plans, regulator-shaped category mappings. We model them explicitly in the database so the audit response stops taking two weeks and the admin team stops being the integration layer.
Recent work / Australian education provider
Replaced manual assessment marking and a three-system student-data reconciliation with one database.
A regulated education provider was running manual assessment marking alongside a fragmented CRM. Student records lived in three systems, instructors spent hours each week on admin instead of teaching, and the weekly reconciliation export between the LMS and the CRM was a load-bearing spreadsheet. We built automated assessment processing with CRM integration on top of a database that modelled the marking rubric, the cohort version, the evidence trail and the student-record spine as the business actually ran them. The straightforward rule-driven marking became automatic; the manual review was reserved for submissions that genuinely needed human judgment. Read the LMS rebuild case study for the longer write-up.
The pattern repeats across the education providers we work with. The longitudinal CPD record the off-the-shelf platform does not carry. The cohort-versioned assessment that breaks when the course gets updated mid-year. The licensee-aggregate report that the LMS produces as a course-completion summary when the licensee wants a per-practitioner cross-tab against regulator categories. We have built around the same shape more than once. One is named (LinkLearn, listed on our trust-logo strip). The others stay anonymised because the cluster of education providers we have done this for is small and the case-study consent on each one is its own conversation.
Read the LMS rebuild case study Read the custom LMS for CPD compliance article Browse all case studies
The engagement path
Discovery call
30 minutes with Marty (founder, doing this since 2007). You describe the platforms you run, the regulator you answer to, and the bits that actually hurt. We tell you honestly whether what you are describing sounds like a custom LMS build, an integration job around your existing Moodle or Canvas, or a sharper SCORM and CRM configuration that would solve more for less. Education providers come to us in two shapes: ones whose evidence-trail and reporting workload has outgrown an off-the-shelf LMS, and ones whose three systems (LMS, CRM, billing) never learned how to share a student record. Either is fine. No pitch.
Systems diagnostic
A fixed-price piece of work. Most operations leads we meet have been burned by an LMS implementation that cost twice what was quoted, so the diagnostic exists to put a real number on the table first. We map where each piece of learner, enrolment, assessment and evidence data lives, who edits it, where it is hosted, and which fields actually matter for compliance, renewal and the report the owner reads each quarter. You finish with a written diagnostic you can forward to the board or the regulator-facing partner, a prioritised list of fixes and a scoped estimate.
Integration or custom build
Most education providers need both. The integration layer puts the LMS, the CRM and the billing stack on speaking terms via a real database. The custom build models the work that does not fit the LMS: cohort-versioned assessments, longitudinal CPD records, supervision logs, regulator-shaped category mappings, the licensee-aggregate report. We build them in stages so the business sees value inside the first quarter, and the spreadsheet that used to hold the audit response stops being load-bearing.
Ongoing support
We do not build and walk away. Regulators revise standards (AHPRA, FAAA, AVETMISS), platforms push major upgrades, your provider adds a second cohort model or a third corporate channel. We stay on as a small ongoing engagement, usually a few hours a month, so the system gets fixed when it breaks and grows when the business grows. The same person who built it picks up the phone.
We have been running this engagement model since 2007. See how we work.
Not sure if your education business needs a custom LMS or a sharper integration layer?
Start with a 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you honestly. Most Australian education providers we talk to are one good integration away from a student record that runs from a database instead of a three-system weekly reconciliation. And if the diagnostic finds nothing worth fixing, you walk away with a clean bill of health for your systems.