How are the recommendation letters sent to colleges on Common App

I plan to apply an EA (haven’t decided which one yet). If I don’t get accepted on 12/15 for my EA school, I would have to send regular decisions to all other schools by 1/1, which leaves only 2 weeks. My questions:

  1. Do the teachers & counselor only need to upload their letters/school report once to the CommonApp or they need to send to each individual school one by one? If latter, I might be in trouble, two weeks may not give them enough time to send >10 letters.
  2. If former, the CommonApp holds their letters/school report until I submit my apps to the colleges, then match and send the recommendation letters to each college seamlessly?
  3. Do the teacher’s rec ltr and counselor’s report/rec ltr act the same way on the CommonApp or they are treated differently? How, if differently?

Based on our family’s experience with applications last year, teachers and counselors only upload their reports/letters once and CommonApp allows all the materials to be downloaded by the colleges seamlessly. Don’t know how to answer #3.

First, you invite the teachers on CommonApp for LOR. The teacher will receive an e-mail to guide him/her to login and submit the LOR. After you have invited teacher(s), you can assign them to the schools you are going to apply. You can have different assignment for different schools. Nevertheless, it will be the same letter from the same teacher if assigned to different schools. The GC and teacher’s LORs are different in content. GC needs to submit school profile and report too. After you submit your application, the school can download your application and LOR from CommonApp. The LoR can be downloaded later if it is not ready at the time the school download the application.