Half-term breaks, bank holidays and other timetable traps

Ask any club owner when bookings go wrong and the answer is rarely week three of a normal term. It is the week after half-term, the bank holiday Monday, the show week when the studio is a theatre. A term is never just twelve tidy weeks, and a booking system that assumes it is will charge parents for classes that never run.

This guide walks through setting up a real term in Tempo Book It: the breaks, the odd Mondays, and the prices that follow along on their own.

Start with the dates you cannot move

School half-terms, bank holidays and your own closures go in first. Tempo treats a term as real calendar dates with breaks inside it, not a count of weeks, so a Monday class in a term with two Monday holidays simply has two fewer sessions. The price of every package updates to match; nobody pays for the 4th of May.

Let the packages do the maths

Once the term knows its own shape, packages price themselves from the sessions that actually run. A full-term package for a class with eleven real sessions costs eleven times the session rate, minus whatever package saving you set. Join late and the same rule applies from the next session, so mid-term joiners see a fair price without you touching a calculator.

The half-term thing sounds small until you have refunded forty parents by bank transfer. Now the term just knows. That one feature paid for the licence on its own.

Sarah, SJP Theatre Arts

A checklist before you open bookings

Five minutes with this list saves a term of apology emails:

• Breaks entered, including any inset days your venue takes
• Bank holidays checked against each weekday class
• Session counts on each class match your paper diary
• One test booking made as a parent, start to finish

If a date changes mid-term, edit the term and Tempo recalculates what is owed, issuing credit where a session disappears. The audit trail keeps a record of every change, so the treasurer stays happy too.