Features
Scheduling, booking and attendance — done properly, and nothing else bolted on
What follows is the whole product. There is no feature here that exists to look impressive in a comparison table, and the awkward cases — one week off, a substitute, a class that fills while somebody is typing — are described because those are the ones that decide whether software is any use.
Scheduling
Set the pattern once
Weekly, on the days you choose
Monday and Thursday at 17:30, from the start of term to the end of it — or with no end date at all, in which case ClassLoop keeps generating sessions ahead of you. Every fortnight is supported too.
One-off classes as well
A workshop, an exam day, a summer intensive. Same fields, one date.
Closures skip themselves
Add a bank holiday or a half-term and the sessions inside it are not created. Add one later and the sessions already inside it are cancelled for you.
Locations and rooms, only if you need them
One studio? You will never see a location picker with one option in it. Three sites with four rooms each? Classes reference them properly, and ClassLoop will not let you put a class in a room at another venue.
Categories carry the defaults
“Ballet Grade 3” knows it is 45 minutes with a capacity of twelve, so the twentieth class of a kind takes seconds.
This session, or the series
The distinction most systems get wrong
Two clearly different buttons
“Edit this session” and “Edit the whole series” are separate actions on separate screens, and the one you are on says which it is.
A change to one week is remembered
Move next Thursday to Studio B, and ClassLoop records that the room on that session no longer follows the class. Edit the series a month later and Studio B stays.
Cancel one evening in one step
The session is cancelled, every booking on it is cancelled rather than deleted so people can still see what happened, and the office gets a note telling it how many people to contact.
Capacity cannot be cut under somebody
Reduce a class from twelve to eight and any week with nine people already booked stays at nine. ClassLoop tells you which ones, rather than quietly dropping a child.
The public timetable
A page you can send to a parent
Your own web address, no sign-in, and quick enough to understand while standing up.
A week on a laptop, a list on a phone
Not a shrunken grid. The phone layout is a different design for the same information, ordered by day, with the two facts that matter — when, and is there room — first.
Filters that fit on the page
Day, class type, teacher and location. Four, not fourteen, and each one is a real link so a filtered view can be sent to somebody.
The answer in words
“3 places left”, “Full”, “Waiting list”, “Cancelled”, “Booking closed”. Never a colour on its own.
Private classes stay private
Mark a class private and it disappears from the public page entirely while still working for staff, bookings and attendance.
Booking
Reserve a place in under a minute
No account, no password
A name and an email address. A phone number and a guardian’s name if you have asked for them. Nothing else, because nothing else is needed to hold a place in a class.
A private link, not a booking number
The confirmation carries a long random link that shows the booking and cancels it. Booking references are sequential and guessable; this is neither, and only a keyed hash of it is stored.
Duplicates are refused
The same person cannot hold two places on one session. Book, cancel and book again, and that works — the constraint is about live places.
Your rules, enforced
Bookings close a set time before the class, cancellations close a set time before that, and you can open bookings a fixed number of hours ahead so a popular class does not fill three months out.
One parent, several children
A household is recognised from the contact address, so a parent booking a second child does not retype their own details, and the office can see the family together.
Waiting lists
A queue, in order, that you can see
Position is deterministic
Assigned inside the database as the booking is made, so two people joining at the same moment get two different positions rather than a coin toss.
Promotion is automatic, or yours
Leave automatic promotion on and the front of the queue takes a freed place immediately. Turn it off and the office decides, one press per person.
Nothing is ever lost
A waiting-list place is the same record as a confirmed one, with a different status. There is no moment at which a booking has been removed from one list and not yet added to another.
Promotion cannot oversell
Promoting somebody by hand into a class that is already at capacity is refused, with a message saying to raise the capacity first.
Teaching and attendance
Fast enough to do before the class starts
Present, Late, Absent, Excused, No show
Five states, which is enough to be honest about a register and few enough to choose from at a glance.
Mark all present, then the exceptions
One control for the room, then individual changes. No modal per person and no save button to hunt for.
Who marked it, and when
Kept on every record, along with the history of any correction. A register that can be changed without trace is not a register.
A teacher sees only their own
Their sessions, their rosters, and the contact number for somebody in their class. Never your booking settings, your member directory, your internal notes or another teacher’s classes — and that boundary is enforced in the database, not only in the interface.
It installs to a home screen
ClassLoop is a progressive web app, so a teacher can open it like any other app on a phone or tablet. Marking attendance needs a connection, and it says so plainly rather than pretending to have saved.
The office
Enough records to run a term, and no more
ClassLoop keeps a member directory because a studio needs one. It is deliberately not a customer relationship system with pipelines and campaigns.
Members
Searchable, paged, filtered
Name, contact details you collected, upcoming bookings, attendance history and a note field. Search is debounced and paged, so a directory of two thousand stays quick.
Archive, or delete
Archiving keeps the history and takes them out of your lists. Deleting removes the record, which is what you need when somebody asks you to.
Reporting
Questions, not dashboards
Attendance by class, attendance by person, how full each class runs, booking numbers, cancellations and no-shows, sessions per teacher — over a date range you choose.
CSV that opens properly
Correctly quoted and encoded, so Excel and Numbers do not turn a name into a formula or a date into something else.
Oversight
An activity trail
Classes created, sessions cancelled, teachers invited, roles changed, attendance corrected, settings altered. Not every click, and never the contents of a private note.
Notices, not notifications
A class has filled. Somebody is waiting. A session was cancelled. Three kinds of message, each with something to do about it.
Deliberately absent
What ClassLoop does not do
Being clear about this is more useful than a longer feature list.
Taking payments. Not yet. The data model is ready for paid classes, passes and memberships, but nothing charges a card today and ClassLoop does not pretend otherwise.
Payroll and accounting. Your accountant has better software than we would write.
Marketing automation. ClassLoop sends the emails a booking requires and nothing else. There is no campaign builder and no mailing list.
An “AI assistant”. There is nothing in scheduling a dance class that needs one, and a feature that exists to be mentioned is a feature that gets in the way.
Video calls, chat and a social feed. Your students already have all three.
See it with your own timetable
Sign in, add a class and a teacher, and you will have a public page to send out in a few minutes.
Still deciding? Read the questions and answers.