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Academic year planning
Model terms, courses, staff, and governance before automatic timetable generation begins.
Juho Isola, Smootables founder
When should academic year planning finish before the timetable solver runs? Most schools need aligned terms, a stable course catalog, and a resource model covering teachers, rooms, and equipment. Planning teams often discover gaps only after export to Untis or when a constraint solver returns an unusable timetable.
These guides explain how planners structure the year, govern planning cycles across departments, and hand off clean data to automatic timetabling. They reference Excel workflows schools replace and the validation checks Smootables runs before generation starts.
These guides cover planner process and decisions, not a Smootables product comparison. To evaluate capabilities, see school year planning software.
Guides in this topic
Select a guide below for process-focused depth on each step.
Term and holiday structure
How to define terms, breaks, and exam weeks so every downstream timetable rule references the same calendar. Covers staggered starts, partial weeks, and vocational block periods.
Read guide →Course catalog planning
Build a course catalog that links subjects, levels, and group sizes before scheduling starts. Includes electives, split classes, and pathway-specific offerings common in vocational colleges.
Read guide →Resource and staff modeling
Map teachers, rooms, labs, and shared equipment to the courses they support. Shows why duplicate spreadsheet rows cause solver conflicts and how a single model prevents rework.
Read guide →Planning cycle governance
Set deadlines, review gates, and ownership so departments submit changes on time. Explains how leadership approves structure before planners lock data for the solver.
Read guide →Timetabling handoff
Checklist for passing a complete year plan to timetable generation without re-keying into Excel or a legacy export. Covers completeness checks and what planners validate before the solver runs.
Read guide →
Related product pages
- School year planning softwareA planning workspace to model academic years, terms, courses, groups, teachers, rooms, and equipment before automatic timetable generation begins.
- Automatic school timetabling softwareConstraint-based timetable generation built into a structured planning workspace, with pre-solve validation, infeasibility reports, and full planner editing afterwards.
See how Smootables fits your school
Book a walkthrough and we will map Smootables to your planning, workload, and timetabling process.