Key takeaways
- Smootables renders every academic year on a campus as one Gantt-style planning timeline over the curriculum offering, with year, period, and week header tiers.
- The timeline runs on the same solver and data model as automatic timetable generation, so a multi-year view and single-term scheduling share one workspace instead of a rebuilt spreadsheet each year.
- Excel and CSV import plus CSV, Excel, and PDF export keep the multi-year timeline connected to the spreadsheets and print views a campus already circulates.
- Every generation creates a branch holding an immutable snapshot, so planners compare, restore, or revert years, and a manual edit lands in a per-branch audit trail.
Why is next year's plan still built from last year's spreadsheet?
You open last year's spreadsheet to build this year's plan. Data for the new academic year lives in a handful of separate Excel files, and pulling them into one usable picture is manual work before the real planning even starts. It has to happen early, too: the year plan is the phase that has to finish before timetable placement can start.
The part that is easy to lose in that process is the year you are not looking at. Once this year's file is built, last year's version gets archived and next year's starts from a blank sheet. One planner described the gap plainly: no way to see the whole picture, how many hours each teacher carries across periods and terms, and a wish for a multi-year view instead of one period or year at a time. A single spreadsheet answers "what does this year look like." It was never built to answer "how does this year compare to the last one, or set up the next."
What does a multi-year planning timeline show in Smootables?
Smootables renders a campus-wide planning timeline over your curriculum offering as a Gantt-style timeline, with year, period, and week header tiers, so it reads every academic year on the campus at once instead of one at a time. A qualification that spans several academic years shows across all of them, in the same view as the term you are currently staffing.
Why does seeing the other years change the planning job?
A rebuild-from-scratch year plan and a multi-year timeline are not the same task wearing different software. When last year, this year, and next year sit in one view, a decision you make for the current period is visibly a decision about the years next to it too, before you have committed to it. Planners who describe wanting a year-calendar view are not asking for a nicer chart. They are asking not to lose the comparison that a single-year file structurally throws away.
What powers the multi-year planning timeline under the hood?
The timeline runs on the same timetable solver and data model as the rest of the platform, not a separate reporting layer bolted on top.
The timetable solver
Google OR-Tools CP-SAT, run in two phases: a feasibility pass, then weighted optimization. It enforces 11 hard constraint families and optimizes 6 weighted, school-configurable soft preferences.
Scheduling granularity
15-minute intervals, with lesson durations from 5 to 480 minutes, so short blocks, double periods, and all-day workshops sit on the same grid without a workaround.
Pre-generation validation
13 pre-generation checks catch a doomed configuration early, and an infeasible run returns one of 9 typed conflict causes with concrete suggestions. A run that cannot place everything still returns a partial timetable, with never-placed lessons parked in a waiting area rather than the whole result discarded.
Branch history
Every generation creates a branch holding an immutable snapshot. Branches can be compared, restored, and reverted, and manual edits are recorded in a per-branch audit trail. Incremental generation regenerates only the groups that changed and preserves the rest of the grid.
How does your data get into the multi-year timeline?
A year's worth of planning data rarely starts in one clean file. Our import tools accept Excel and CSV for resources, the teaching offering, and full period plans. Where a school's data needs more than that, the Smootables team migrates it by hand as part of onboarding new customer schools.
Exports go the other way just as directly: CSV, Excel with one sheet per period, and a PDF print view. That means a multi-year timeline still hands off cleanly to whoever on your campus works from a printed grid or a shared spreadsheet, because the export formats match what your campus already circulates.
- Parsing the uploaded Excel or CSV file
- Column mapping to your fields
- A preview step before anything is committed
- Ambiguous-match handling for unclear rows
- Duplicate detection across files
How does the timeline stay one standard across planners and campuses?
Where several planners share the work, or a campus runs the planning phase across more than one site, the year plan can vary by who is doing it and when, simply because there is no shared standard to hold it to. The multi-year timeline is one place that standard can live: the same structure, the same constraint set, and the same view of every year on the campus, regardless of which planner opened the tool.
That is also what the branch history under the timeline is for. Every generation is a snapshot you can compare, restore, or revert, and a manual edit lands in that campus's audit trail rather than in one planner's private spreadsheet. The planner who builds the plan sees a job that got easier; the person who has to sign off on how the year was planned sees the same audit trail as a control, not just a convenience.
Questions schools ask about multi-year academic planning
Does the multi-year timeline replace year-by-year timetable generation?
No. The timeline runs on the same timetable solver and data model as the rest of Smootables (Google OR-Tools CP-SAT, run in two phases: a feasibility pass, then weighted optimization), so a multi-year view sits alongside single-term timetable generation rather than replacing it.
How much of the campus does the multi-year timeline cover?
The timeline shows every academic year on a campus at once, including a qualification that spans several academic years, in the same view as the term you are currently staffing.
Can we reconcile last year's plan with this year's in one view?
Yes. Last year, this year, and next year sit in one view, so a decision you make for the current period is visibly a decision about the years next to it too, before you have committed to it.
How does our planning data get into the multi-year timeline?
Our import tools accept Excel and CSV for resources, the teaching offering, and full period plans, through a pipeline of parsing, column mapping, a preview step, ambiguous-match handling, and duplicate detection. Where a school's data needs more than that, the Smootables team migrates it by hand as part of onboarding new customer schools.
Where is the data behind the timeline hosted?
Hosting is in the EU, specifically Azure in Sweden. If your school runs the AI-assisted planner, teachers, students, and groups cross that boundary as numerical codes only, with names re-expanded client-side, and the AI feature stays off until a school turns it on.
Where does the data behind the timeline live?
Hosting is in the EU, specifically Azure in Sweden. If your school runs the AI-assisted planner, teachers, students, and groups cross that boundary as numerical codes only, with names re-expanded client-side, and the AI feature stays off until a school turns it on.