Trials
Free trial classes: the allowance, booking into a real class, no-show emails, and converting to an enrollment.
A trial is a prospect with a fixed number of free classes. It is its own lifecycle, deliberately separate from an enrollment: a trial student is a real student record who appears on the attendance sheet and can check in at the kiosk, but is on nobody's roster and owes nothing.
Students then Trials is the screen.
How many free classes
Studio then General → Trial Classes. One number, between 1 and 100, and a Save button.
The allowance is frozen when the trial is created
Each trial keeps the number that was set at the moment it was created. Changing the setting affects trials created afterwards and never touches one already running — as the card itself says: "Changing this only affects trials created afterwards."
Where trials come from
There are exactly two doors, and neither is a "New Trial" button on this screen:
- The registration form — a family ticks "I'd like to try a class first".
The registration lands in your worklist with a purple Trial badge, and a
trial is created alongside it. The
?intent=triallink pre-ticks that box. - Converting a lead — Convert to Trial on Students then Leads. See Leads.
A student can only have one live trial at a time.
The five statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Created, no class booked yet. This is your queue. |
| Active | At least one class booked. Set automatically by the first booking. |
| Converted | They enrolled. Terminal. |
| Expired | Every allowed class has been used and the last one has finished. Set automatically overnight. |
| Cancelled | Ended by staff without an enrollment. |
The table sorts live trials (Pending and Active) to the top, and the All Statuses dropdown filters it.
Booking a class
Open a trial and you get two buttons.
Book into an existing class
The straightforward option: a list of upcoming regular classes for the next 28 days — date, time and program — with a Book link on each. Tap one and they are booked.
Classes are listed whether or not you have already looked at those weeks on your schedule; the app generates them for the booking list. Cancelled classes and other students' one-to-one intro sessions are not offered.
Schedule 1:1 intro session
Creates a brand-new one-off class just for this prospect: program, date, start and end time, and an optional instructor. As you pick a date, the panel shows what is already on the schedule that day so you do not double-book a mat or an instructor.
The new class shows up on your schedule and attendance calendar badged Trial with the prospect's name, so nobody is surprised by it.
Neither route will book a class that has already ended — a booking in the past would score as a no-show immediately and email the family about it.
The class allowance
The rule is simple and enforced server-side, not just hidden in the interface:
The number of bookings a trial holds — past, upcoming, attended or not — may never exceed its allowance.
- A booked-but-not-yet-happened class counts. A one-class trial with tomorrow evening booked cannot book anything else.
- Cancelling a booking frees the slot — but only if the class has not happened yet. A class the student attended, was excused from, or no-showed is spent, and the app refuses to free it.
- A studio-cancelled class never counts. The student neither used nor forfeited anything.
The trial's card shows how many classes have been used — meaning the class has finished, or attendance has already been recorded for it. An upcoming booking holds a slot without showing as used.
Each booking carries its own result:
| Result | When |
|---|---|
| Upcoming | The class hasn't happened yet. |
| Attended | Marked present or late. |
| Excused | Marked excused. |
| No-show | The class ended with no attendance row, or with an absent one. |
| Class Cancelled | The class was cancelled by the studio. |
When every class is booked, the panel says so: "All allotted trial classes are booked or used. Convert the student to enroll them."
Trial students on the day
A booked trial student is not invisible to the rest of the app:
- They appear on the class's attendance sheet as an expected row with a Trial badge, before anybody marks anything.
- The attendance calendar shows "1 trial student" on the class.
- They can check themselves in at the kiosk with their own check-in code, exactly like an enrolled student, within the same one-hour window.
The no-show email
A nightly job emails prospects who did not turn up. Worth understanding, because it goes out in your studio's name:
- It runs once a day and looks back two weeks. A no-show older than that is left alone — a "we missed you" email a month late is worse than none.
- Absent counts as a no-show. Excused does not. So marking a genuine "let us know they can't make it" as Excused on the attendance sheet is what stops the email.
- One email per booking, ever. It is claimed before it is sent, so a retried or overlapping run cannot double-send.
- Trials that have already converted or been cancelled are skipped.
The practical consequence: take the register for classes with trial students in them, on the day. A class nobody marked looks identical to a class the prospect skipped.
Expiry
The same nightly job marks a trial Expired when every allowed class has been booked and the last of those classes has finished. Nothing is emailed; the status simply stops it appearing as live work.
An expired trial cannot book more classes. Convert it, or start again.
Converting to an enrollment
Convert to paid enrollment on the trial panel: pick a program, press Confirm enrollment.
That creates an active enrollment in that program and marks the trial Converted. From then on the student is on the roster, counts in reports, has a resolved tuition rate, and — if you use monthly billing — can have billing started from Students then Enrollments.
The program you convert into does not have to be the one they trialled.
If they are already enrolled in that program you get "Student is already enrolled in this program" — pick the other program, or nothing needs doing.
Converting does not take any money
A converted trial is an enrollment, not a payment. Setting up monthly billing is a separate, deliberate action on the enrollments screen. See Starting monthly billing for a student.
Cancelling a trial
Cancel trial ends it without an enrollment. Every future booking is removed so the student stops appearing on upcoming attendance sheets and can no longer check in at the kiosk. Classes that already happened stay on the record.
A converted trial cannot be cancelled — the enrollment is the live record from that point. Cancelling twice does nothing.
Individual bookings can also be cancelled on their own — Cancel on the booking row — with a prompt reminding you it frees one of the student's trial classes. For a one-to-one intro session, cancelling the booking also cancels the class you created for it, unless attendance has already been recorded.
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