Swim school and squad booking software

Terms, and the family that joins in week five

Lessons are sold in term blocks with the sessions generated from the weekly pattern between the start and end dates. Where the block crosses a public holiday and the pool is closed, exclude the date during setup: Australian public holidays are flagged for review, the excluded date is shown to families on the class page, and nobody is charged for it. Pro-rata is a per-class setting, so a level that is happy to take joiners can be set to charge only for the remaining lessons, calculated at the moment of booking and shown to the parent as an adjusted price with the remaining count beside it.

The waitlist for the after-school slots

Four to six on a weekday is the scarcest water in the country, and how the queue for it is run defines the parent's experience of the school. When a class is full the waitlist turns itself on, and families are notified in the order they joined. A spot is strictly first-come, first-served with no hold and no expiry window, so the notification tells people to act quickly rather than implying a reservation they do not have. A family that loses the race is returned to the queue automatically instead of being dropped, and every waitlist join is a contact record, so an entire term's unmet demand is a list you can message the day a new lane opens.

Squad training and lane time

Squads sit above the learn-to-swim ladder and behave differently: attendance is expected rather than optional, the group is often selected, and training runs to a set of sessions per week rather than a single lesson. Run as a term class, a squad can be published invite-only so it never appears in a public search. Lane time itself is sold as facility hire when a club or an outside group wants water without a coach: half-hour increments against live availability, with a member rate and a separate early-morning or evening rate.

How the three programs differ

Most swim schools run all three of these at once, and the questions parents ask about each are completely different.

Cancellations, credits and the make-up question

Every swim school gets the same call: my child was sick, what happens to that lesson. Cancelling within the class's allowed window issues credits to the family's account automatically, with no form and no phone call, and those credits are then usable against another booking. If the school has to move a term's dates, every enrolled family is notified and given the option to cancel for a full credit within a response window rather than being told after the fact. Text messages are reserved for cancellations specifically, so a closed pool reaches people who are already in the car.

One account, several children

A parent with two or three children at different levels is the normal case, not the edge case. One account holds a profile for each child, with credits tracked separately per child, and a single checkout can enrol all of them. Reminders go out automatically a day and an hour before each lesson, which is the single biggest reduction in no-shows most schools see.

Which setup fits you?