Setting up LitosFlow for your school

This is the setup walkthrough behind LitosFlow for schools. It's aimed at the office — a principal, an administrator, an operations lead — and assumes no technical background.

Start with three boards

A board is a place work lives, shown as columns you drag cards between. Three of them cover a school year:

Build Maintenance & IT first. It has the clearest before-and-after: staff currently email the office and hear nothing back, and this board gives every request a number and a visible status. The Approved column matters in a school — plenty of requests need a yes from someone with a budget before any work starts, and that pause should be visible rather than silent.

Tags: the cross-cutting labels

Tags cut across boards to answer questions the board layout can't:

maintenance, it, safety, events, comms, budget

safety is the one worth insisting on. Being able to pull up everything safety-related in one list — across maintenance, events and committee work — is exactly what you want the week before an inspection.

Priorities without ceremony

• Urgent — a safety issue, or something stopping teaching today.
• High — needed this week; an event or deadline depends on it.
• Medium — the default. Most requests.
• Low — the wish list. Do it in the holidays.

Agree that Urgent means "safety or teaching stopped" and it will keep its meaning all year.

Mapping the features to your week

Requests from staff → an intake form (paid plans). Publish a request form and share the link with all staff — a bookmark on the staffroom machines, a line in the weekly bulletin. Teachers file a request in twenty seconds without an account, it lands on the Maintenance board with a ticket number, and they can be told "that's OAK-63, it's scheduled for Thursday" instead of "I'll ask".

Term tasks → recurring tickets. Fire drills, report card deadlines, newsletter dates, termly inspections, equipment checks. Set the schedule once and the task comes back every term without anyone remembering to remember.

Event season → due dates and the calendar. Break each event into real tasks with owners and dates — book the hall, order supplies, arrange parking, brief the volunteers — and watch the calendar instead of your inbox. A concert is not one task; it's twenty, and that's exactly why it goes wrong.

Staff, coordinators and committees → roles. Office staff and coordinators get Member so they can run boards and any ticket. Teaching staff who mainly file and follow requests get Agent. Keep Org Admin to the leadership team. Full ladder in Roles and permissions.

Committee meetings → the board itself. Open the committee's board in the meeting. The agenda becomes "what's stuck", and the minutes are the comments people already wrote.

Your first 30 minutes

1. Create the Maintenance & IT board with Requested → Approved → In progress → Done. (5 min)
2. Add your tags from the Tags page. (3 min)
3. File the maintenance requests sitting in the office inbox right now. (6 min)
4. Invite three people: your caretaker as Agent, your office administrator as Member, your deputy as Manager. (4 min)
5. Set up two recurring tickets — the fire drill and the newsletter. (5 min)
6. Publish a request form for staff if you're on a paid plan, and send the link out. (5 min)
7. Open the Calendar and check the next month. (2 min)

Add the Events and Committees boards when the term demands them — one working board beats three empty ones.

What to read next

• Working with tickets — share this with staff when you roll it out.
• Roles and permissions — decide who gets what before you invite everyone.

Not set up yet? Create your school's workspace — free for small teams, no credit card.

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