Course Catalog (LMS-lite)

The problem this kills

Your training "system" is a spreadsheet and an overflowing inbox. Someone wants a course, they email you. You check the price, ask their manager, copy a row, lose track of who approved what, and field the same questions about seat caps and prerequisites over and over. New courses get added in five different formats. When finance asks how much you spent on training last quarter, you spend an afternoon reconstructing it.

A full LMS would fix some of this - but it costs real money, takes months to roll out, and is wildly overpowered for a team that just needs a clean place to list courses and route enrollment requests.

What you'll build

A lightweight "course store" for your organization:

• A searchable, filterable catalog - browse by category, role, tag, format, and cost.
• Course pages that show description, duration, cost, format, prerequisites, seat cap, and whether a seat is still open.
• Self-enroll for free/low-effort courses; request-and-approve for anything paid or time-heavy.
• A rule engine that decides automatically whether a request needs a manager's sign-off (based on your cost/time threshold and whether the course is external/paid).
• A manager approval queue, plus a catalog-owner queue for approving new course listings.
• Seat caps and automatic waitlists when a course fills up.
• Email notifications to the learner and manager at every step.
• A clean CSV export of enrollments in exactly the columns your existing system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which then builds the tool with you step by step. No prior coding needed.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, how your courses and roles are actually named, your typical and peak enrollment volumes, your exact approval thresholds, and your messy edge cases (cancellations, no-shows, prerequisite overrides, manager-of-a-manager approvals). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything. You get a tool shaped to how you run training, not a generic template.

Inside you'll find:

• A discovery interview with concrete, training-specific questions.
• The exact data model for courses, employees/roles, enrollments, approvals, and waitlists.
• Copy-paste prompts for each build step, in order.
• The approval rule engine and the human approval gates.
• The full notification flow via email.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can import courses and your roster from a spreadsheet today and export enrollments as CSV - fully buildable with zero integration work.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan bakes in the controls that make a tool safe to run on real people and real budgets:

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so people only see their own organization's data, and learners can't peek at others' enrollments.
• A complete audit trail - who requested, who approved or rejected, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate before any paid or time-heavy seat is committed - the system drafts the enrollment, a manager reviews and approves, and only then is the seat booked.
• Duplicate guards so the same person can't be double-enrolled in the same course during an active enrollment window.

Who it's for

Small and mid-sized organizations with no LMS - the ones tracking courses in a shared spreadsheet and approving enrollment requests over email. Ops, HR, L&D, and BPM professionals who want a real, governed course catalog without buying or rolling out a heavyweight platform.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.