Selling a course to one person and selling training to a company are different jobs. The company is one buyer with many learners. Somebody has to decide who gets a seat, add and remove people as staff come and go, and prove to the manager who paid that the team is actually learning.
If your LMS only knows about individual students, you end up doing all of that by hand: creating accounts, enrolling people one by one, emailing progress spreadsheets. It works for one client and falls apart at five.
Learnomy Pro has a feature built for this, called Spaces. A space is a mini-school for one organization, with its own roster, its own courses and its own owner. This guide covers how to sell one, how seats are counted, how the owner runs it without touching wp-admin, and the privacy defaults you should review before a client signs up. Spaces are a Pro feature.
A space is a mini-school
Think of a space as a container for one organization. It holds a roster of people, a set of assigned courses and a seat limit. When someone joins the roster, they’re enrolled in every course assigned to the space automatically. Nobody enrolls individual staff by hand.
You’ll find spaces under LMS Commerce, Learning Spaces. The wording follows your site’s vocabulary: rename “Space” to “Team” in the label settings and the plans screen reads Team Plans.
Each space has its own settings, which matters when one client wants everything visible and another wants the roster private. They sit side by side on one site, each with its own rules.
Two ways to start one
You can create a space yourself and add the client to it. That suits a sales-led deal: you agree terms, set the space up and hand over the keys.
Or you can sell a plan. You publish a space plan on your site, a buyer finds it, pays, and Learnomy creates their space for them. No admin has to touch anything for the sale to complete. That’s the self-serve route, and it’s the one worth understanding properly.
Selling a plan
Open LMS Commerce, Space Plans, and create a plan. The form is short:
- Title and description. What the buyer sees on the pricing card, so say who the plan is for.
- Seats. How many seats the space starts with. The default is 25, with a minimum of 1.
- Billing. One-time, monthly or yearly.
- Price. The total charge for the plan. It is not a per-seat price.
- Trial days. Days before billing starts. This only applies to recurring plans.
- Pre-assigned courses. The courses every new space on this plan starts with.
- Status. Active puts it on your public plans page. Draft keeps it hidden while you work.
You don’t enter any gateway product or price IDs. Learnomy creates the matching price at your gateway on the first purchase.
One thing to decide on purpose is the course list. It does two jobs. It’s the starting curriculum, so a new space isn’t empty on day one. And it’s the shopping list for the owner afterwards: a space owner can add courses themselves only if they are free and published, or bundled in the plan their space was sold under. Anything else has to be requested from you.
What happens when they buy
Provisioning is automatic and works the same through every payment route. On a completed purchase, Learnomy:
- creates the space, named with whatever the buyer typed on the way in
- makes the buyer the owner, without changing their WordPress role
- sets the seat limit from the plan
- assigns every bundled course
- records a subscription against the space if the plan is monthly or yearly
- emails the buyer to say their space is ready
The buyer lands on the thank-you page with a button to open their space and invite people. After that you can rename the space, change its settings or adjust its seat limit from wp-admin, just like any other space.
How seats are counted
Seats are where B2B sales go wrong, so the rules are worth knowing exactly.
The owner holds a seat. A 25-seat plan covers the owner plus 24 team members. Tell your sales team this, or the first client who counts heads will ask where the missing seat went.
Suspended people still count. A suspended member keeps their place on the roster, so they still use a seat. That fits the idea that you still bill for them.
The count can’t be beaten by a race. When two people are added at the same moment, the seat check and the insert happen under a lock for that one space. If the lock can’t be taken, the add fails rather than risk going over the limit. A paid cap holds even when several people are added at the same moment.
Seats can be topped up. A seat pack is a separate product that raises the limit on a space that already exists. The owner buys one from their dashboard when they run out, through a real checkout. It’s one-time only. A seat pack raises the seat limit and changes nothing else: not the plan, not its price and not the bundled courses.
Adding people
The owner has four ways to build a roster:
- Type an email address. If the account doesn’t exist, an invitation is queued.
- Paste addresses or load a CSV. The sample file has three columns: first name, last name and email. Names matter because they’re used to build a clean username for people who don’t have an account yet.
- Share an invite link. It’s on by default, stays valid for seven days, and many people can use the same link.
- Let people ask to join. Also on by default. Nobody is added by asking: the owner sees a join request and decides.
Rows without a usable email are skipped, and the message names the line number so a client can fix the file instead of hunting. The export has the same three columns first, so a roster can be exported, edited in a spreadsheet and loaded back in.
Suspend instead of delete
Companies get behind on payments and people go on leave. Deleting a member loses their record, so Spaces offers a gentler option. Suspend pauses someone’s access and leaves everything else in place.
A suspended member keeps their role, join date and seat. They get nothing from the space while suspended, including courses granted through a group, and they see a message that their access is paused instead of a broken, empty page. If the space has notifications on, they get an email that says their access has been paused, not removed. That wording is deliberate. It avoids a support reply from somebody who thinks they were fired.
To pause a whole client, set the space itself to inactive. An inactive space grants nothing at all, and setting it back to active restores every grant at once. It’s the right tool for an unpaid invoice.
Managers and groups
A client’s HR lead shouldn’t need your help to run a training program. Spaces has a Manager role, in two forms:
- Space-wide manager. Can add and remove members, change roles, assign courses, manage groups and see reports, like the owner but without owning the space.
- Group-scoped manager. Sees and manages only the groups they’ve been given, such as one department or one region.
A manager can suspend and resume students, but never the owner or another manager. The role belongs to the space, not to WordPress, so nobody gets wp-admin access to do it.
Groups let an owner split a roster into departments and give each its own courses. A client can turn the Groups tab off for a space that doesn’t need it.
What the owner sees
The owner works from their own dashboard on your site, without a wp-admin login. It has the roster, invite codes, CSV upload, course management, announcements and per-member progress reports.
That dashboard is a large part of the sale. A training manager who can see that 18 of 25 people finished the safety course on their own wins you a renewal.
Privacy defaults to review
Most settings default to on, which suits a corporate client and doesn’t suit every group. Check these on each space:
- Show each member’s progress to the owner: on.
- Let the owner export the member list: on.
- Let the owner invite people with a link: on.
- Let people ask to join: on.
- Let the owner message everyone: on, with announcement emails on.
- Show the member count or course list to visitors: off.
Show progress and export are the two to think about. A company usually wants them. A peer support group, where members shouldn’t be visible to each other’s employers, does not. Turn them off for that space.
What this does not promise
- Pricing is flat. A plan has one total price. It isn’t a per-seat rate, so I wouldn’t describe it as pay per seat.
- Seat packs are one-time purchases. They top up a space and don’t change its recurring plan.
- Free trials apply to recurring plans only.
- Recurring billing runs through Stripe, or WooCommerce with its subscriptions extension. PayPal recurring for space plans is planned and not shipped yet. A daily check keeps each space’s status in step with its subscription.
Test it before you sell it
- Create an active plan with two seats and one bundled course.
- As a test buyer, go through the plan’s buy link and name the space.
- Confirm the space is created, the buyer owns it and the course is assigned.
- As the owner, add one member by email. Try to add a second, and confirm the cap holds, because the owner holds the other seat.
- Suspend the member and confirm the course closes and the seat is still used.
- Buy a seat pack and confirm the limit rises.
- Set the space to inactive and confirm every grant stops.
Where to go next
If you sell to businesses, the corporate training page shows the whole offer from the buyer’s side. The Spaces documentation covers every setting, and what a standalone LMS gives you over a plugin stack explains why a built-in feature beats stitching tools together. Free vs Pro lists exactly what needs Pro.