Starting a New School Year | Help Center

A new school year or term touches billing, your policy and the calendar. This guide gives the steps in order, and each step links to the article with the detail. Owners and admins do steps 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7. In step 6, only the owner can turn on the studio page and the form.

Steps

Set this year's rates. On the Plans tab of your billing dashboard, open a plan's Actions menu and choose Edit. A new amount bills from the next billing run for every student on the plan. Invoices already made do not change. To change the price for some students only, make a new plan and move them to it (see Changing a Rate or a Student's Plan). For lessons with no plan, update Default Lesson Rates on the Rates and Fees tab. See Billing Plans.
Add a registration fee. On the Recurring Fees tab, click Add Fee. Enter the Name and Amount ($), choose Per Student or Per Family, and leave Frequency on Annual. Set the Assessment Month and Assessment Day to the date the fee is due each year. Waiver Window (days) starts at 60, so students added fewer than 60 days before that date are not charged: set it to 0 if every student must pay. See Recurring Fees, Rates and Tax.
Update your policy. In Studio Settings, open Policy and edit the active policy. To ask every family to agree again, click Require re-acceptance… and confirm. Families agree the next time they open the parent portal, and Family Agreements shows who has agreed. See Studio Policies and Family Agreements.
Set your teaching hours. Update your Weekly Template in availability. Each teacher sets their own hours, and owners and admins can edit any teacher's. See Setting Availability.
Make the new lesson schedule.
- A student whose lesson moves to a new day or time: click their next lesson, choose Edit Lesson, then Edit all future instances, and change the day and time. Trio moves every later lesson of the series.
- A series that ends: choose Edit all future instances on its last lesson and set the End Date. Then click Schedule Lesson and Add recurrence to make the new series.
- Group classes: end last year's repeating classes, then make new ones and add the students. See Repeating Group Classes.
If a later lesson is on an invoice or has a note, a practice assignment, a package lesson, attendance or a makeup credit, an End Date change saves nothing and lists those lessons. Recurring Lessons gives three ways to continue.
Take new students. In Owner Settings, make sure Publish your studio page (the Studio Site tab) and Enable Applications (the Applications tab) are both on, then work through new and waitlisted applications. See Your Studio Page and Application Form and Applications.
Tell families. Send one group message with the start date, the new rates and the registration fee. See Group Messages.