Your questions, answered.

No. A planner requires you to organize your content before you can use it, and then maintain that organization constantly. Homeschool Managed works the opposite way.

You tell Clara everything your family does on a recurring basis. Curriculum, chores, routines, extracurriculars, your schedule, your kids' needs. She builds a structured plan from that. The maintenance burden is on the system, not on you.

The difference: Planners require you to do the organizing before you get any help. Clara does the organizing for you.

No. You stay in complete control of every decision about how your kids learn. Clara handles the operational layer: the organizing, the tracking, the carrying forward, the scheduling.

You choose the curriculum. You set the pace. You decide what matters. This just means you are not also the one holding every single piece together in your head all day.

Most homeschool tools are built for parents who are already organized and need better tools to sequence what they have planned. They require you to enter your curriculum one course at a time, set term dates, build your schedule, and organize everything before the product does anything useful.

Homeschool Managed starts one step earlier. Instead of a setup form, there is a brain dump. Instead of entering a schedule, you describe your family's life in plain language. Clara does the structuring from there.

The parent who is ready for a traditional scheduling tool is not our customer yet. Our customer cannot get to organized yet. We meet families at the moment of overwhelm and do the organizing for them.

No. That is the whole point. You start with a brain dump. No templates, no setup forms, no curriculum to enter first. You tell Clara everything your family does regularly, and she builds the system from that.

Most families do one comprehensive brain dump at the start and update Clara when things change. The system holds everything in between. That is the opposite of adding to your plate.

Then this is exactly what you need. Most systems require time and attention to maintain. Homeschool Managed is designed to run with minimal ongoing input.

You do a brain dump when you start and update it when things change, either by talking to Clara directly or by adjusting tasks manually. The system holds everything in between. One brain dump can carry a family through a full semester.

The brain dump is how you set up your family's plan. You tell Clara everything your family does on a recurring basis: what curriculum each child uses and where they currently are in it, how often subjects happen, chores, routines, extracurriculars, your schedule, days you are unavailable, anything that affects your week.

You type it in plain language, messy and unfiltered. Clara reads it, extracts the structure, and builds a working plan. Most families do this once at the start and then update as things change.

This is not a daily check-in. It is a one-time comprehensive capture of your family's recurring patterns. One brain dump can carry your plan for months.

Once at the start, then when things change. Most families do a full refresh once or twice per semester.

In between, you can talk to Clara to make smaller adjustments: add something new, change how a subject is scheduled, update when a child finishes a curriculum and needs a new one. You can also adjust tasks manually at any time. The system is designed to be responsive without requiring constant upkeep.

The system recalculates. Unfinished tasks carry forward automatically to the next school day. Your overall plan adjusts around the disruption. Nothing is lost and nothing requires you to manually reschedule.

Think of it like Google Maps hitting a detour. The destination does not change. The route does. No guilt. No starting over.

Two ways. You can talk to Clara directly to update your plan: add something new, change a schedule, pause a subject, adjust how a curriculum is paced. Clara adjusts the system from that conversation.

You can also edit tasks manually at any time. Add a task just for today, remove a task from the plan entirely, or reschedule something specific. Parent override always takes precedence over the system.

No. Please do not. The whole point of the brain dump is that you start from wherever you actually are. Incomplete, behind, messy, unsorted. Clara works with what is real, not what is ideal.

If you are not even sure what curriculum you are using next year, that is fine. Start with what you have now. Clara can handle ambiguity and uncertainty. You can always update her as things become clearer.

That is the starting point. Type exactly that and add whatever comes after it. Clara works with confusion as well as clarity.

The brain dump does not require you to have a plan before you submit it. It is designed to help you build one from whatever you have right now.

Yes. Homeschool Managed works with any curriculum: classical, Charlotte Mason, unschooling, eclectic, unit studies, textbook-based, or anything else. You choose how your children learn. Clara manages the execution.

Clara has an extensive curriculum knowledge base that covers hundreds of programs, including lesson counts, recommended pacing, and scheduling guidance. When you name a curriculum in your brain dump, Clara can estimate how to schedule it across a full year and adjust that pacing as your child progresses.

Clara has a built-in curriculum knowledge base covering hundreds of commonly used homeschool programs. When you tell her what curriculum your child is using and where they currently are, she knows the typical lesson count, the publisher-recommended pacing, and how to schedule it across a school year.

For less common or custom curricula, she works from what you tell her and makes reasonable estimates. She flags those estimates so you know to verify them. And when she gets something wrong or needs to adjust, you can update her and she recalculates.

Tell Clara in your brain dump or update conversation. She will adjust the pacing and catch-up plan for that subject. The system flags subjects that are falling behind on the parent dashboard so you always know where attention is needed.

You can also change the pacing manually for any curriculum at any time. If you want to slow down on a difficult concept or speed up because your child has mastered the material, the system adjusts accordingly.

The system will surface a notification on your parent dashboard when a curriculum is nearing completion, giving you time to choose what comes next before you run out. When you update Clara with the new curriculum, she builds out the new schedule and picks up where the old one left off.

No. The system organizes your day, it does not deliver it through a screen. Your kids open their task view briefly to see what to do next, then they go do the actual work: reading, writing, math, science, whatever your curriculum calls for.

The screen time is the check-in, not the education. Most students spend less than two minutes in the app per task check-off.

The brain dump is the clinically validated starting point for how neurodivergent minds externalize and process what they are holding. Therapists use it for ADHD and executive function challenges specifically. Getting it out before organizing it is the right starting point for how our brains actually work.

The three-week failure cycle in most systems is caused by setup friction and maintenance burden. The brain dump removes the setup barrier. Auto-carry removes the maintenance burden. You do not have to rebuild the plan when a week goes sideways. The system recalculates around it.

That said, no tool is magic. We are honest about that. What we can say is that this was designed from the inside of the problem, by a parent with ADHD who has been through the planner graveyard personally.

Each student has their own profile with settings you control. You can set their independence level, support type, and task visibility mode independently from every other student in the household.

Task visibility options include Full Day (sees all tasks at once), Chunked (sees a set number at a time, reveals more as they complete), and One at a Time (sees only their next task). For students who are easily overwhelmed by a full list, this makes a significant difference.

ND Support mode changes how tasks are presented and how the system responds when a day does not go as planned. This was not added as an afterthought. It was one of the first things designed.

If systems have not stuck before, that is not a willpower problem. It is a friction problem. Every planner that failed your family required you to maintain it manually. When a week went sideways, the plan broke and never got fixed.

The brain dump removes the setup barrier. Auto-carry removes the maintenance burden. The system is designed for the reality that life interrupts everything, not the ideal where it does not.

This was specifically built for you. The whole point of student task views is that your kids know what to do without asking you. Each child opens their view on any device and sees their tasks for the day in the right order for their independence level.

You can also note your schedule constraints in your brain dump or update. Clara will flag tasks that require your involvement separately on the parent dashboard, so you can plan when to address those during windows when you are available.

Any device with a browser. Phones, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops. The parent dashboard is designed for phones because that is how most parents manage their day. Student task views work great on tablets and Chromebooks, which is what most homeschool kids use for independent work.

One system. Every device. No app download required during beta.

Each student has their own profile with settings you control independently. Independence level (Guided, Semi-independent, or Independent), support type, task visibility mode, and whether tasks require parent review are all configured per student.

One child can see their full day at once. Another can see one task at a time. You set it once. The system runs to those settings every day.

Yes. Chores, household responsibilities, cooking practice, life skills, anything that repeats in your family's week can be part of the brain dump. Clara schedules them alongside academics and assigns them to the right people.

Building independence and household responsibility into the school day is not an afterthought for a lot of homeschool families. It is part of the education. The system treats it that way.

Yes. When a student completes all their tasks for the day, there is a celebration state in the student view. It is a meaningful moment, not just a checkmark. Building the habit of completion and the satisfaction of a finished day is part of how the system supports kids long-term.

Yes, actually free. No credit card required. No trial period that converts automatically. No catch.

Beta is free because we are building this with real families and your feedback is genuinely valuable. When paid plans launch, you will be notified and you choose whether to continue. Nothing converts automatically.

Paid plans start at $19 per month, or $179 per year. All plans include every feature, up to 6 students, no per-child fees, and no feature tiers.

Founding families who join during beta can lock in $149 per year permanently. That rate never increases regardless of future pricing. This offer closes when beta ends.

See the pricing page for full details.

Everything stays. Your brain dumps, your student profiles, your settings, your history, all of it carries over when you move to a paid plan. You do not start over.

During beta, you are not paying anything, so there is nothing to cancel. After beta, monthly plans cancel whenever you want. No contracts, no cancellation fees.

If something is not working, we genuinely want to know. We are in beta specifically because we are still building. Your experience shapes what gets fixed and what gets built next. Email us at info@homeschoolmanaged.com.

Google Sheets and Notion offer maximum flexibility but require the parent to design, build, and maintain their own workflow from scratch. There is no homeschool-specific intelligence, no auto-carry, no student task views, no curriculum pacing, and no system that recalculates when life shifts. The parent is the entire system.

Homeschool Managed does the structural work for you. You describe your family's life and the system builds and maintains the plan. The difference is between building a system and using one.