Lanes, instructors and packs: a swimming school’s week on one screen
A dance studio fills a room. A swimming school fills a lane, with an instructor in it, at an hour when the pool lets you have it. Most diaries track the person and forget the water.
That is how two groups end up in lane three on a Tuesday, or how an instructor is booked for a private lesson while the only free lane is taken by the improvers. The fix is to book the lane as seriously as the person.
Lanes are resources, not notes
Add each lane as a resource, and link each lesson to the lanes it may use. A booking then takes an instructor and a lane together, and the slot is offered only when both are free. A beginners’ group needs one lane; a squad session might need two. The pool’s own hours go in as the place’s opening hours, so nothing is offered while the water belongs to someone else.
- Group lessons with a capacity and the places left shown live.
- One-to-one lessons in each instructor’s own diary.
- A waitlist for full groups, offered the freed place in one tap.
The same hour every week, without retyping it
A child who swims on Thursdays at five swims on Thursdays at five until the summer. Set that once at the desk as a standing booking — weekly, fortnightly or monthly — and every lesson lands in the diary as its own visit, with its own reminder. If one week clashes with a pool closure, that week is reported, never forced into a lane that is not there. Moving one lesson moves only that lesson.
Standing bookings are for one-to-one lessons. A group term has its own timetable: the sessions open ahead, each swimmer is enrolled once with a seat in every lesson, and a drop-in still books a single one.
Packs that parents can read
Most schools sell lessons in packs of eight or ten, and most arguments with parents are about how many are left. Sell the pack through your own payment gateway, and it sits on the swimmer’s card with its balance. A one-to-one lesson uses its pack at checkout, and the person who holds the pack sees the same number on their own page at setvos.com.
Write the balance down once, in one place, and let both sides read it. Most of the arguments stop there.
A child is a record under the parent who pays. The swimmer’s level, notes, lessons and pack stay with the swimmer, and the receipts with the person who paid; a parent with two swimmers has both on one card.
Progress, kept where the instructor will look
Levels go in as tags or a custom field, notes from each lesson on the swimmer’s card, and dated measurements — the distance swum, a timed length — as a short history the next instructor can read before the lesson starts. When a swimmer moves up, change the tag: the history stays.
What it does not do yet
Renting a lane without an instructor is not a booking of its own today: every lesson is booked with an instructor. We would rather you knew that before the first week than after.