Recurring Weekly Class Schedule

Say you teach a Tuesday evening kirtan circle, a Wednesday morning yoga class, or a Thursday sound healing session that meets in the same room at the same hour every week. Building each of those as a separate event on your calendar means typing the same name, the same teacher, the same room, the same duration and the same price fifty-two times a year — once for every week the class runs. It also means your attendance history ends up split across fifty separate records that have no idea they belong to the same class, so you can never look in one place and see how a Tuesday evening has actually gone over a season. A recurring weekly schedule solves both problems at once by inverting the relationship: you describe the class once, place it on your weekly timetable, and every Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday session is generated from that single definition rather than rebuilt from scratch.

The class definition holds everything that stays the same from week to week: its name and description, who teaches it, where it happens, how long it runs, what it costs, and how many people fit in the room. The weekly schedule is the separate layer that says when — which day, which time, repeating week after week. Each individual session then carries what genuinely changes from one week to the next: who has booked, how many places remain, and who is currently on the waiting list for that particular date. Keeping these three things apart protects you from two different headaches. Edit the definition once — a new price, a corrected description, a different room — and every future session updates automatically, without you opening fifty separate entries by hand. And when something local goes wrong on a single date, your regular teacher is away or the room is double-booked, you can cancel or reassign that one session alone, while every other date on the timetable carries on exactly as scheduled.

A weekly class does not really have one capacity — it has a capacity for each night it runs, because a room holds what it holds on that particular evening, regardless of how many people showed up the week before or will show up the week after. BrightStar treats capacity as a property of the individual session for exactly this reason: this Tuesday's count of places taken and places remaining is entirely separate from next Tuesday's, and neither one affects the other. This is also why check-in happens per session rather than per class as a whole. When someone arrives at your kirtan circle, they are checked in against that specific date, so your attendance record shows who came on which night — a real, dated history — rather than one blurred running total for 'the Tuesday class' in general.

Once a given date reaches its capacity, anyone who books after that point joins that session's waitlist specifically — not a waitlist for the class in general. This distinction matters in practice. If your Tuesday kirtan circle is full but this Thursday's sound healing session, or even next Tuesday's circle, still has open places, a person waiting for this Tuesday is not quietly bumped into one of those other openings; they are waiting for this date, and only this date. Cancellations follow the same logic. If someone drops out of this Tuesday's session, the place that opens up goes to whoever is next on this Tuesday's waitlist — not to someone waiting on a different day entirely. Capacity, bookings and the waitlist all travel together with the session, never with the class as a general pool.

Because the class definition and its individual sessions are kept separate, you are never forced to choose between changing this one Tuesday and changing every Tuesday from now on. If your regular teacher is unavailable for a single date, someone else can cover that one session without touching the class record at all — the following week reverts to your usual teacher automatically, with nothing further to undo. If a date needs to be cancelled outright, for a holiday or a room conflict, cancelling it removes only that one occurrence from the timetable. Every other date keeps its own bookings, its own capacity, and its own waitlist exactly as they were before. Nothing about editing or cancelling a single session reaches backward into past dates or forward into future ones beyond the change you actually made.