Built by Elevate for Helper of Moms, a company on a mission to make homeschooling easier.
In short: Elevate built HOMS, a mobile-first web platform that automatically turns a photo of a child's schoolwork into an organized, state-ready homeschool portfolio, generating monthly, quarterly, or annual compliance reports in a few taps.
Parents already do this work once, in real life. HOMS makes sure they don't have to redo it in a binder, a spreadsheet, or a folder of photos for the state. A quick picture of a worksheet lands automatically in the right learner's Goal Map, and a report can be generated and emailed in a few taps.
Every homeschooling family ends up doing a version of the same second job: documenting what actually happened. Which subjects got covered, how often, and proof of it, because most states expect some form of record for compliance. That proof usually lives across a binder, a phone camera roll, and a spreadsheet nobody updates consistently.
Helper of Moms came to Elevate in March 2024 with a clear thesis: if a parent is already taking a photo of the worksheet on the kitchen table, that photo should be the record. No separate data entry, no end-of-quarter scramble. They needed a platform built for how homeschool parents actually work: on a phone, in short bursts, between everything else in the day.
What We Brought to This Project
HOMS needed a partner who could take a product from a napkin-sketch feature list to a live, paying, production platform, and then keep building alongside them. That meant a mobile-first data model for learners and image-based work samples, a subscription business built in from day one, and a reporting engine flexible enough to match how different states expect records to look.
Elevate's engineering team owned the build end-to-end: architecture, development, and production deployment, then came back for two more rounds of work as HOMS added subscriptions, a knowledge base, and now ongoing managed services.
No mainstream tool treats a photo of a worksheet as structured, reportable data. Note apps store images with no learner context. Spreadsheets store data with no images. Generic homeschool trackers weren't built mobile-first, so parents fell back to whatever was fastest in the moment, usually a camera roll or a folder that never got organized. HOMS needed all of it built from the ground up.
Parents weren't going to fill out a form for every worksheet. The upload flow had to be fast enough for a phone, one tap to capture, automatic filing into the right learner's Goal Map.
One primary account can hold several learners, each with their own criteria, plus additional sub-users. Removing a learner had to fully erase that learner's data, not just hide it.
Stripe-backed billing had to gate access at sign-up and gracefully lock and unlock the app around expired cards, without a confusing experience for a non-technical parent.
Compliance expectations vary widely by state. The reporting engine needed monthly, quarterly, and annual options, pulling directly from the images already stored in each learner's Goal Map.
Blog posts, articles, and guides needed a browsable, categorized home inside the app, editable by HOMS's own team, without linking out or duplicating content from the website.
The Core Problem
The record parents already create (a photo of the worksheet) had never been treated as the report.
Documentation Coverage
Where the old default tools stop, and where HOMS keeps going.
Elevate built HOMS around a simple core idea: every uploaded photo belongs to a learner and a subject, and once it's filed, it's usable for reporting, browsing, and record-keeping without the parent doing anything else.
A primary account can add, edit, and remove multiple learners, each with their own tracked criteria, plus additional sub-users for co-parents or grandparents helping out.
Snap a picture of finished work right from the phone. It's automatically associated with the right learner and subject inside their Goal Map, no manual filing required.
Monthly, quarterly, or annual reports compiled directly from Goal Map images, sent to any email address the parent chooses, state-compliance-ready.
Sign-up requires an active subscription. Parents can update payment info or cancel any time, and expired subscriptions gracefully lock access until resolved.
A categorized library of blog posts, articles, and guides that HOMS staff maintain directly inside the app, browsable by every user without ever leaving HOMS.
A staff-facing view of every account: user list, learner counts, and last report pull, giving the HOMS team visibility without touching the database directly.
Elevate architected HOMS on Node.js and Express with MongoDB Atlas as the data layer and AWS as the deployment target, a stack chosen for how quickly it lets a small team ship, iterate, and layer on new functionality without a rebuild. The initial milestone sequence, staging environment, authentication, learner and user management, image upload, reporting, and production deployment, mirrored how a parent actually onboards, and shipped to production in mid-2024.
Stripe was integrated at the architecture level rather than bolted on later, so subscription state gates access cleanly throughout the app. When HOMS came back for a second phase in September 2024, Elevate added subscription management and the knowledge base as clean extensions of the same data model, and now supports the platform on an ongoing managed-services basis covering project management, architecture, development, and DevSecOps.
HOMS has gone from a service order sketched on paper to a live, subscription-based production platform Elevate continues to support. What started as an MVP build in 2024 is now a multi-phase product with billing, reporting, and a managed knowledge base, backed by an ongoing services relationship.
The manual work of building a homeschool portfolio, binders, spreadsheets, folders of photos, is now a byproduct of the photo a parent was already going to take.
Three separate engagements since 2024, MVP, subscription and knowledge base expansion, and now ongoing managed services, on the same platform and the same team.
A parent can generate a state-ready report in any of three intervals directly from the images already stored in a learner's Goal Map, no spreadsheet required.
Subscription billing and a self-serve knowledge base mean HOMS staff can manage revenue and content without needing an engineer for either.
From a folder of photos on a phone to a compliance-ready report, in the time it takes to make dinner.
HOMS is a mobile-first web platform built by Elevate for the homeschool education company Helper of Moms. It lets parents photograph a child's completed schoolwork, automatically organizes those photos into a per-learner Goal Map, and generates compliance-ready progress reports on demand.
Every photo a parent uploads is filed under the correct learner and subject in that learner's Goal Map. When a report is requested, HOMS compiles the dated work samples already stored in the Goal Map into a monthly, quarterly, or annual report and can email it directly, without any manual data entry.
Yes. A single primary account can add, edit, and remove multiple learners, each with their own tracked criteria, and can add additional sub-users such as a co-parent or grandparent who also captures schoolwork.
HOMS runs on a Node.js and Express.js backend with MongoDB Atlas as its database, deployed on AWS. Stripe handles subscription billing and access control, gating the app around active and expired subscriptions.
Yes. Because compliance expectations vary by state, HOMS supports monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting intervals, each compiled from dated work samples in the Goal Map so a parent has documentation ready for state submission without rebuilding it by hand.
Yes. Elevate has supported HOMS through three engagements since 2024: the original MVP build, a second phase adding subscriptions and a knowledge base, and an ongoing managed-services engagement covering project management, architecture, development, and DevSecOps.
HOMS is live in production, subscription-gated, and generating reports for real families. More importantly, it's a platform Elevate keeps building on. The original MVP grew into a subscription business, then a self-managed knowledge base, and now runs under an ongoing managed-services engagement covering project management, architecture, development, and DevSecOps.
That kind of continuity is the point. HOMS didn't need a vendor for a single sprint, it needed a team that would still be answering the phone two years later. Elevate's engineers have stayed the technical backbone of the product from the first line of code through every phase since.
Project at a Glance
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