Training Management System [2026]
Your unified solution for training customers and employees
In this guide, you will discover what a Training Management System is, what it isn’t, and why it can revolutionize your training operations.
Table of contents
- What is a Training Management System?
- How does a Training Management System work?
- Key features in a Training Management System
- Features in EduAdmin TMS
- Who is a Training Management System for?
- Why is a Training Management System so important?
- What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?
- What is a Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)?
- Purchasing a Training Management System
- FAQ - Frequently asked questions
What is a Training Management System?
What is Training Management Software?
A Training Management System, also known as a course administration platform, is designed to manage and deliver all types of training for customers, partners and employees, including commercial training. It serves as a centralized platform for creating courses and content, scheduling sessions and managing instructor and classroom availability. You can easily set prices and discounts and handle payments, invoices and credit notes.
The platform’s automation features automatically send emails and SMS messages to confirm bookings, notify participants and instructors before the course, invite attendees to course evaluations and issue digital certificates.
Imagine running your entire training operation from a single place that is accessible around the clock.
With a Training Management System, you save days of work every month. No more late nights trying to catch up.
How does a Training Management System work?
All training providers already use one or several tools to run their operations. You might work with a website that includes an e-commerce module, multiple Excel files, manual invoicing in your accounting system. It works, but it could be far more efficient. Solutions like these allow you to get by, but they make it difficult to stay competitive in a constantly evolving industry.
Modern training companies avoid entering the same data in several different places and avoid the risk of duplicates and spelling errors. With a Training Management System, all these processes are handled automatically with validation and automation built in.
The time you save through significantly reduced administration can now be used to improve your courses, communicate with your customers or partners, or enjoy some well deserved free time. With a Training Management System at the core of your operations, you gain invaluable decision support through powerful analytics and reporting tools. This provides additional competitive advantages over other providers.
Your result is a training operation that is always up to date, modern and efficient.
Key features in a Training Management System
What features are included in modern training management software?
General features for course coordinators and training administrators
- Manage logistics and resources - schedule courses, book instructors and classrooms
- Automate manual tasks - the platform automatically sends booking confirmations, notifications, reminders, course evaluations and certificates
- Sales and finance - manage bookings, receive payments and send invoices
- CRM and customer records - get a complete overview of your customers’ and participants’ courses, progress, bookings and orders
- Reports and analytics - make decisions based on accurate and up to date data
A professional experience for customers and participants
- Standalone website - create a public website with a booking portal and smart booking forms directly inside your Training Management System
- Embedded booking - integrate booking functionality into your existing website with a smart JavaScript solution
- Smart booking forms - forms that always display the correct fields, maintain a consistent design and include built in checkout via Stripe
- Participant portal - participants always have access to their courses and course information, can view progress and finish digital content, and download certificates for completed courses
Authoring tools for e-learning courses
With a modern Training Management System, you get a powerful authoring tool to create digital content for your courses. With ready-made activity types such as content pages, video, audio, presentations (PowerPoint or PDF), quizzes and digital exams, you can easily create attractive and easy-to-read content for e-learning, blended learning and instructor-led courses in the classroom or online (ILT/vILT). You can even upload full SCORM packages that you created in other tools.
Scheduling and resource planning
A Training Management System provides smart tools to schedule multiple courses at once, assign instructors and keep track of room and equipment availability. You get a clear overview of upcoming courses, tasks to be completed, revenues and expenses, without having to switch between different tools.
Bookings and participants
In a Training Management System, the booking forms collect exactly the information you need for registration and follow-up, as well as the details participants need to complete the course. Course administrators and instructors can then update attendance, track participants’ progress, and assign grades after the course is completed. Your Training Management System automatically sends the correct booking confirmation, SMS notifications and follow-up emails.
Automatic management of bookings, invoices and payments, or card payments
A Training Management System automatically creates an order for each booking. The order can become an invoice in your accounting system or be paid directly by credit card, Swish, or installment payments through integration with Stripe, Svea and Nets.
Reports and analytics
Data from all parts of your operations is automatically available in a single platform, enabling real-time reports on orders, customer satisfaction, availability and resource utilization, as well as participants’ progress and course history. These data are accessible through dashboards and downloadable Excel exports. Make data-driven decisions based on always up-to-date information.
Features in EduAdmin TMS
Who is a Training Management System for?
Roles
Course administrators
Course administrators find a Training Management System perfect for scheduling courses, booking instructors, following up with participants, completing tasks on checklists and generating reports.
Training managers and executives
A Training Management System provides ready-made reports to track the performance of courses, instructors and other external partners. Course evaluations and analytics give powerful insights into how your operations measure up against your goals.
Instructors and teachers
In the instructor portal, instructors can update their availability, view participant lists and update attendance. They can also perform ID verification, grade assignments and exams.
Sales representatives and Key Account Managers
Sales teams get a complete and always up-to-date overview of upcoming courses and available slots and can easily create manual bookings for their customers. They also see which instructors are available and can quickly create a bespoke course for a client. Reports on each salesperson’s performance and sales are always available in a Training Management System.
Marketers
With a Training Management System, marketers can quickly generate selections of participants who have attended a course but not others and create targeted marketing campaigns. The system also tracks the source of each booking, making it easy to see which campaigns work and which need improvement.
Target audiences and types of training
A Training Management System is mainly used for two types of training operations:
- Internal training - training for employees, partners or members where participants do not pay course fee.
- External training - public open courses or bespoke courses where participants or clients pay for the training.
The key difference between these two target audiences is that open commercial training requires additional features to manage:
- Finance - handle bookings, payments and invoices.
- Website integration - allow your customers to view and book courses directly on your website.
- Marketing - enable you to promote your courses on social media and via email, including support for discount codes, early bird offers and gift cards/vouchers.
- Analytics - manage expenses, revenue, profit/loss and break-even points.
- Sales / CRM - allow your sales team to actively work with their customers within the same platform.
Trades and industries
EduAdmin Training Management System is used by companies in a variety of industries, including:
- Compliance training in construction, road work, manufacturing, fire and safety, transport and logistics. Examples of courses include Road Work, CDM (Principal Designer/Contractor), HSWA, Hot Work Permit, CPC and more. EduAdmin Training Management System has all the features required to manage training, validation, certificates and permits for your clients.
- IT and software training. EduAdmin is designed to manage classroom scheduling, installations, instructors and equipment. You can even mix on-site participants with remote participants in the same course.
- Business and leadership training. With features for professional website integration, blended learning tools such as assignments, remote meetings via Zoom and Teams, and clear and simple scheduling for your coaches and instructors, you can take your operations to a completely new level.
- Trade unions and membership organisations. EduAdmin Training Management System has a modern API that enables fast and professional integrations with membership systems, self-service portals with login via eIDs and more.
Why is a Training Management System so important?
4 common problems our customers faced before choosing EduAdmin Training Management System
- Lots of manual work - Our customers’ users spent several hours, sometimes days, per week updating data across multiple systems, manually creating certificates and diplomas in Word, and manually generating invoices. This caused two problems: it was very time-consuming and prone to errors. Mistakes, in turn, required even more time to correct.
- Manual work that cost a lot of money - Personnel costs are the largest expense for training companies. This time should instead be spent on improving operations by making the right decisions and continuously improving areas with potential for growth. People should be used for what they do best – coming up with smart ideas – not copying data from one Excel file to another.
- Relying on generic tools or Excel files - Previously, our customers had digitized some processes, but the various tools and platforms did not communicate with each other. For example:
- Simple forms were implemented on the website where each registration or booking was sent by email or ended up in an Excel file.
- An employee received the email or Excel file and transferred the data to another Excel file containing the course's participant list.
- The participant list was updated before the course, and afterward the data had to be copied again to create an invoice.
- Poor customer experience - Your customer chose to book your course and expects a smooth and professional experience. Issues with registration, correcting incorrect information, or having to register across multiple platforms make customers more likely to try another supplier next time.
These problems often resulted in:
Inefficient processes:
- Simple tasks were manual and time-consuming
- Data was copied to multiple locations, making updates a nightmare
- Double-booking of classrooms and instructors led to canceled courses and dissatisfied customers
- Attendance records were inaccurate when done on paper
Limited business growth:
- Too much time was spent on manual tasks that did not contribute to business development
- Profits went to personnel costs instead of efficiency-boosting investments
- Difficulty obtaining data for targeted marketing made campaigns generic and less effective
Poor user experience:
- Process shortcomings caused participants and customers to be negatively affected
- The website was not always updated, so customers had to make a phone call to get latest course information
- Customers could not update their own contact information, view course history, or download their certificates, resulting in more manual labor for the training provider
Benefits of a Training Management System built for both small and large training organisations
We see that both large and small training organisations grow rapidly when a Training Management System is at the core of their operations. Choose EduAdmin and let your new Training Management System help you:
- Save time - Say goodbye to late nights and long lists of emails, invoices and booking confirmations to send. The time you save can be spent creating new course content, finding new partners, or simply relaxing.
- Enhance the customer journey - Automate all time-consuming tasks and let your customers notice the difference. Make it easy for participants to register on your website, receive updates via email and SMS, complete the course within the same platform, and get targeted, personalised follow-up.
- Hit your sales targets - With EduAdmin, you don’t just get a Training Management System that handles resource planning and scheduling. You also get powerful tools for marketing segmentation, creating simple and attractive registration forms, tracking goals, and analysing results.
- Be ready to scale - Size doesn’t matter. You can easily double your results without additional staff. With EduAdmin Training Management System, you compete on the same level as your larger competitors.
- Focus on what matters - EduAdmin saves you a lot of time. Use it to have fun, grow, and achieve success!
See what we mean, try EduAdmin today
Contact us for a demo
What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?
What is the difference between a Training Management System and a Learning Management System?
An LMS is used to create and deliver e-learning courses to your participants. The focus is only on the user experience for your participants. In an LMS, you can create courses, enrol participants, and generate reports on participants’ progress.
You can also add activities to courses, such as quizzes, videos, SCORM learning packages, and assignments. Some LMSs also allow instructors and participants to send messages to each other.
Who uses a Learning Management System?
- Universities often use an LMS for their courses and programmes.
- Companies use an LMS to manage internal employee training.
- Training organisations that sell e-learning or blended learning courses.
Do I need an LMS?
EduAdmin is both a TMS and an LMS!
EduAdmin includes all the features of a standalone LMS, such as e-learning courses with video, text and image content, and learning packages (SCORM, CMI5, xAPI). For blended learning, it also offers ID verification via Swedish BankID (eID), assignments, timed digital exams with question banks and randomised questions.
In EduAdmin, instructors can also send messages to participants, open different parts of the course for them, and start digital exams.
Can I manage with just a standalone LMS?
A training organisation that lacks a TMS but has an LMS must rely on integrations or manual work to transfer data between systems. An LMS often cannot fully manage instructor-led classroom courses (ILT), virtual instructor-led training (vILT) or blended learning, which means all administration for these courses must be handled outside the LMS.
Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)?
What is a CRM?
A CRM is a tool that many companies already have. They are used to manage all information about your existing and potential customers. You can often add notes and to-do tasks. This tool is most commonly used to manage sales processes that require recurring contact with the customer and the customer’s contact persons.
Do I need a CRM?
It depends. If you or your salespeople handle many incoming prospects in longer sales processes, then a CRM can be useful.
EduAdmin TMS has many CRM functions built in, such as customer register, contact register, orders and bookings, prices and discounts.
If you work extensively with bespoke training for your clients and have longer sales processes, it may be interesting to integrate EduAdmin with your CRM via EduAdmin’s modern and powerful API.
Purchasing a Training Management System
When is it time to purchase a Training Management System?
- Do you currently spend a lot of time sending joining instructions, creating invoices, updating dates and places remaining on your website?
- Do you currently update Excel registers or paper records in your daily operations?
- Are there many errors that constantly need correcting?
- Do your customers suffer from these mistakes you make?
What should I consider when choosing a Training Management System?
Which features do I need?
- Do I need smart scheduling features?
- Should my website update automatically when I make changes to the courses?
- How should I manage payments for the courses?
- Automation for confirmations, joining instructions, follow-ups?
- Do I create and sell e-courses?
- Do I need to manage certificates and diplomas?
- Should the instructors themselves record attendance and perform certain tasks?
- Do I need to be able to integrate my TMS with other systems?
Compliance and legal requirements
GDPR and other legislation determine how and where you can store your participants’ personal data and other company data. End customers may require you, as a data processor, to ensure that data is processed in accordance with GDPR or other data protection laws. This means you need to be aware of where data is processed and how.
Continuous development
Choose a Training Management System and a provider that regularly releases new updates and features. Ask how often the platform is updated and whether all customers automatically receive all updates. A platform that continually grows in the number of features and improvements increases your ROI over time.
World-class customer support
The market is full of providers who only offer support via a ticketing system or through a support portal with pre-written articles and guides. Choose a provider who, in addition to this, can also be reached by phone, email and chat.
Custom-built or a off-the-shelf Training Management System?
Custom-built systems, or systems with general modules adapted for training, are commissioned by you as the customer and assembled case by case by the supplier.
Pros of a custom-built TMS:
- Customised to the needs you communicated to the provider
- Integrations with other systems as part of the delivery
- You only pay for the features and demands you communicated
Cons of a custom-built TMS:
- A high up-front cost
- Long delivery time
- A lot of maintenance and increasing “technical debt”
- Stuck with what you commissioned from the start
- No open user training available from the supplier
- Your specification of requirements needs to be very thorough and precise
- The scope often increases during the implementation phase, along does the costs
Off-the-shelf Training Management Systems are cloud-based (SaaS) and are already operational and thoroughly tested by numerous training providers. They are usually ready to use immediately upon ordering.
Pros of a off-the-shelf TMS:
- Turnkey solution
- Very fast implementation phase
- Low or no up-front cost
- User training during implementation and then ongoing
- Accessible user support
- Solution centre with articles and guides
- Always the latest version and regular updates, including completely new features
- More features than those originally included in your specification of requirements
- Flexible and scalable
- Complies with all laws and regulations, such as GDPR
Cons of a off-the-shelf TMS:
- You do not have full control over updates; the supplier does
- The supplier controls the pricing of licenses and features
- You may need to adapt parts of your operations for the TMS to suit you
- You usually pay the same fee even when you do not use all the features
What is the cost of a new Training Management System?
After features and potential opportunities/time savings, the price of the investment is a major factor.
Turnkey off-the-shelf systems are almost always the most cost-effective investment when compared to custom-built solutions. The supplier’s development cost for new features is spread across all the supplier’s customers and their subscriptions. With a custom-built system, you bear 100% of the cost for new features, updates and configuration changes.
EduAdmin’s pricing model is transparent and flexible. Fill in your details to access our price list.
Beware of hidden or variable costs
- Processing fees - Some suppliers charge per participant or per course conducted on the platform. This is often not transparent or predictable from the outset and may only be mentioned in the fine print.
- Percentage-based fees - The supplier wants a fixed percentage of the revenue you generate on the platform. There may also be a fixed minimum fee when you organise courses and seminars that are free.
- Modules that incur additional costs - The supplier usually provides a demo showcasing all the features available in their Training Management System. Be sure to ask what is included in the version you are reviewing and what comes at an extra cost.
- Long contract terms - Some suppliers try to entice you with substantial discounts if you choose to sign a multi-year agreement. If you are unsure whether the supplier and their system are right for you, you should aim for a 12-month contract at the standard price, and perhaps include a clause allowing you to terminate early if certain requirements are not met.
Compare and evaluate
Ensure that the supplier you choose has good references and reviews. Check sites such as G2.com and see what other training providers say about the system you are considering.
See what we mean, try EduAdmin today
Contact us for a demo