The 60-day window, and what starts it
MCL 257.320d(1) gives an approved sponsor 60 days from the date the Secretary of State notified you that you were eligible to report your successful completion. The clock starts at the notice, not at the ticket, and finishing is what has to happen inside it.
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Almost every mistake drivers make with the basic driver improvement course is a mistake about this one deadline.
What the statute actually says
MCL 257.320d(1) withholds the points for a moving violation if the driver "attends and successfully completes a basic driver improvement course under this section and an approved sponsor provides a certificate of successful completion of that course to the secretary of state not more than 60 days after the date on which the secretary of state notified the individual that the individual was eligible to take a basic driver improvement course."
Three things follow from that sentence.
The clock starts at the notice. Not at the stop, not at the ticket, not at the court date, and not at the day you paid for a course. MCL 257.320d(2)(a) says the Secretary of State notifies an eligible driver by first-class mail at the last known address on the license. If that address is stale, the letter still went out and the clock still started.
Finishing is what has to happen inside 60 days, not starting. The thing that has to reach the state is a certificate of successful completion. Enrolling on day 58 does not satisfy this.
A sponsor has to report it. The obligation in the statute is on the approved sponsor to provide the certificate to the Secretary of State. Downloading your own copy is not the same act.
There is no extension
MCL 257.320d(2)(c) says that if an approved sponsor does not provide notice of successful completion within the time prescribed in subsection (1), "the secretary of state shall enter the points required under section 320a." The statute sets out no extension, no good-cause exception and no tolling for a pending court date. Missing the window is simply the points going on.
What to do the day the letter arrives
Write the date on the letter down, count 60 days forward from it, and treat that date as the day the certificate has to be filed rather than the day you have to be finished. Then keep the letter. It is the only document that proves when the window opened.
If you are not sure whether a notice was ever mailed to you, the Secretary of State is the office to ask. A traffic school cannot see your eligibility notice, and this site's ticket tool says so plainly: it can only give the earliest date a window could close counting from the ticket, because it has no way of knowing when the state wrote to you.