How to Set Up a New Swim School Term (Step by Step)

Setting up a new term is one of those tasks that sounds simple but quietly eats an entire day if you don’t have a clear process. Classes to update, sessions to generate, enrolments to carry forward, invoices to create, parents to notify — it all has to happen in the right order or something breaks downstream.

At Vale Swim Academy, we’ve refined our term setup process over several years. Here’s the exact sequence we use, and how we’ve brought the time to set up a full term down from most of a day to about two hours.

Before You Start: What You Need Ready

Before you touch any software, get these decisions made:

• Term dates — start date, end date, and any bank holidays or closure days
• Any changes to the class timetable — new classes, cancelled classes, changed days or times, new instructors
• Any changes to fees — if you’re increasing fees this term, now is the time to update class prices
• Stage movement decisions — which swimmers are moving up to the next level

Having these agreed before you start means you won’t need to pause mid-setup to chase answers.

Step 1 — Create the New Term

In ClassBase, terms are the container that everything else sits inside. Create the new term with:

• Term name (e.g. “Autumn Term 2025”)
• Start date and end date
• Whether to set it as the default term (so it appears first throughout the system)

This takes about 60 seconds.

Step 2 — Add Closure Days

Before generating any sessions, add all the days the pool will be closed during the term — bank holidays, pool maintenance days, half-term if you don’t swim through it.

In ClassBase, you can add closure days individually or bulk-import them. Once added, any session that would fall on a closure day is automatically skipped when you generate sessions. This is the step most people forget to do before generating sessions and then have to clean up afterwards.

Step 3 — Copy Forward or Rebuild Classes

If your class timetable is largely the same as last term, use the copy-forward function rather than rebuilding classes from scratch.

Copy-forward replicates every class from the previous term — name, day, time, skill level, instructor, capacity, fee — into the new term. It takes about 10 seconds regardless of how many classes you have.

After copying forward:

• Remove any classes that are no longer running
• Update days or times for any classes that have changed
• Add any new classes
• Update instructors where needed

If your timetable changes significantly from term to term, building classes fresh from scratch is often faster than copying and heavily editing.

Step 4 — Generate Sessions

Once classes are set up and closure days are in place, generate sessions for each class.

In ClassBase this is a single click per class (or you can generate for all classes at once). The system calculates every date the class runs across the term, skips closure days automatically, and creates the full set of sessions.

Review the session count for a couple of classes to sense-check — if a Tuesday class should run 10 sessions in a 12-week term with two bank holidays, verify that’s what you’ve got.

Step 5 — Handle Stage Movements

Before you carry forward enrolments, process any swimmers who are moving up to a new class. This is the right moment because:

• It avoids generating invoices at the wrong fee for moved swimmers
• It keeps the class rosters accurate from the start of term
• Parents get notified of the new class before the term starts rather than during it

In ClassBase, stage movements update the student’s skill level and transfer their enrolment to the new class in the new term. Their attendance and progress history carries forward automatically.

Step 6 — Re-enrol Returning Students

The majority of your students will be returning in the same class next term. Bulk re-enrolment handles this in one operation rather than individually processing each student.

In ClassBase: select the term → select the classes → choose “re-enrol all current students” → review the list → confirm.

ClassBase creates an enrolment record for every returning student in every class. The whole operation takes under a minute for a school of any size.

Students to exclude from bulk re-enrolment:

• Students who have given notice that they’re leaving
• Students who are moving to a different class (already handled in Step 5)
• Students on medical leave

Step 7 — Add New Enrolments and Process Waiting Lists

After bulk re-enrolment, deal with the waiting list. Who has been waiting for a place and is now being offered one this term?

In ClassBase, the waiting list view shows everyone waiting per class with how long they’ve been waiting. Offer places in order, and ClassBase automatically sends the offer notification and — if GoCardless is set up — triggers the mandate invitation at the same time.

New students who aren’t on the waiting list can be enrolled directly through the enrolment flow.

Step 8 — Generate Invoices

With all enrolments in place, generate invoices for the term.

In ClassBase: Invoicing → Generate Invoices → select the term → review → generate.

ClassBase creates one invoice per customer covering all their students’ enrolments for the term. Pro-rata adjustments are handled automatically for students who start mid-term.

Review the generated invoices before collecting — check that the amounts look right, that no one has been accidentally invoiced twice, and that any students with an invoice exclusion flag have been correctly skipped.

Step 9 — Collect Fees

If you’re using GoCardless Direct Debit, collection is a single batch operation from the invoicing dashboard. Select all outstanding invoices → Collect via DD → confirm. Payments arrive three to five working days later.

If you’re collecting by other methods (card, bank transfer), send the invoices to parents from the invoicing dashboard and they can pay online through the portal.

Step 10 — Notify Parents

Send a term start communication to all parents — class times, venue reminders, any changes from last term, and the payment collection date if you’re on DD.

In ClassBase this can be sent as a bulk email from the messaging module, targeted to all active customers for the term. You can also send class-specific messages to individual class groups if different classes have different information to share.

The Full Sequence at a Glance

Done in order, with ClassBase handling the repetitive parts, a full term setup takes around two hours for a school of 150–300 students.