Resources
School timetabling & planning guides
Practical guides for academic year planning, automatic timetabling, vocational scheduling, teacher workload, constraints, and moving from Excel.
Juho Isola, Smootables founder
School planners typically research timetabling software by comparing constraint solvers, teacher workload rules, vocational workshop scheduling, and Excel migration paths, not just feature checklists from vendor demos. Peers at similar schools, MATs, and vocational colleges often share what failed when data was still spread across spreadsheets and established tools such as Untis.
These guides organize what experienced planners validate before choosing a system: term structure, course catalogs, resource models, constraint sets, and rollout plans. Use them to benchmark Smootables against your current process and to prepare stakeholder questions before you run a timetable solver.
Browse by topic
Academic year planning
Model terms, courses, staff, and governance before automatic timetable generation begins.
View guides →School timetabling
Generate, validate, and refine timetables with constraint-based solvers and planner control.
View guides →Vocational timetabling
Schedule workshops, labs, workplace learning, and mixed theory-practice weeks in vocational colleges.
View guides →Teacher workload
Balance contract hours, part-time staff, overload checks, team teaching, and fair distribution.
View guides →Timetable constraints
Configure hard and soft constraints for rooms, teachers, equipment, and curriculum rules.
View guides →Excel to timetable software
Move from spreadsheet timetabling to Smootables with phased migration, cleanup, and validation.
View guides →
See how Smootables fits your school
Book a walkthrough and we will map Smootables to your planning, workload, and timetabling process.