Sessions & Booking Slots
Booking slots are the building blocks of your register. Each slot defines a session window (e.g. Morning 08:00–13:00) that children can be booked into. They drive the SerenPass register, ad-hoc session booking, and the council attendance export.
Creating a Slot
Go to Contracts & Sessions. In the Time Slots card, click New. You can also click Create Time Slot while creating a child's contract. Fill in:
- Title: the name shown on the register and the contract (e.g. "Morning Session", "After School"). If you use Welsh, there are boxes for the Welsh title and description too.
- Session Type: see below
- Amount: the price of the session
- Colour: the colour on the scheduler and contract (Pink by default)
- Time Start / Time end
- Flying Start applicable and Foundation Phase applicable: tick if that funding can cover the session. Only children marked as eligible are funded.
- Show on Homepage: show the session under "sessions" on your homepage
- Mark as Unavailable: if the session is full or unavailable
Under Advanced options there's:
- Let parents book this session: parents can pick dates themselves, up to 8 weeks ahead
- Places available: the most children on any one day (leave blank for no limit)
- Minimum notice (hours): how far ahead a parent has to book
- Manual deduction from invoice: takes the session's amount off the invoice as a fixed sum. Use this instead of Flying Start applicable, never as well as it.
Click Create new to save.
Session Types
Assigning a session type lets you filter and report on sessions separately. The available types are:
- Term time: standard term-time session
- Holiday club: holiday period sessions (e.g. summer club)
- All year: sessions that run through term time and holidays, for children who attend all year round
- Trip / Event: one-off trips or special events
The session type badge is shown on the register header. It is a label only and does not change how contracts are invoiced. Billing through holidays comes from your setting's holiday dates and the bill-through-holidays setting. Childcare Offer funding is set on the contract, not the session type.
Editing & Deleting Slots
In the Time Slots card on Contracts & Sessions, click any slot's name to open it. Change what you need and click Save changes. To delete a slot, click Delete in the same window.
Scheduling Children into Slots
The Scheduler lets you drag children onto slots on a weekly schedule. This drives the "scheduled" list on SerenPass for each day. Children not assigned to a slot can still be signed in via the All Children section.
School Groups
For after-school clubs, create a group for each school under Groups & Pickups and add the children you collect from there. Open the group and tick Use for SerenPass Collections. Those children then show under the school's name in the School Collections panel on SerenPass, so it's easy to see who needs collecting from where.
Auto-Create Contracts from Requested Sessions
When a parent requests specific sessions during registration or when updating their details, they show up as blue Requested badges on the Scheduler's "Create a Contract" panel for that child.
Click Add Requested Sessions (the magic-wand button) and the requested slots and days drop straight into the drag-and-drop contract builder - no need to retype what they've already told you.
You can still adjust anything after it lands before saving the contract as normal.