Scheduling recurring weekly lessons

Lessons in Encore Studio are built around weekly recurring schedules: a day of the week, a start time, and a duration, tied to a student, a teacher, and (for in-studio lessons) a room.

The rolling 12-week calendar

When you create a schedule, individual lesson occurrences are generated on your calendar about twelve weeks ahead, and the horizon extends itself automatically every night. You never have to "re-generate" a term — as long as the schedule is active, future lessons keep appearing.

Each occurrence is its own lesson: it can be cancelled, moved or completed without touching the rest of the series. From any lesson you can also move the whole series to a new day and time — choose This and all future lessons on the calendar.

Times are studio-local

All times are wall-clock times in your studio's timezone (set in onboarding, editable in Settings → Business). A 4:00 PM Tuesday lesson stays 4:00 PM across daylight-saving changes — the underlying instants adjust, not the clock time families see.

Teacher buffers

Every teacher has a buffer minutes setting (0–480, default 60) — the travel and reset time the scheduler keeps between one family's lesson and the next family's. If a new slot overlaps another lesson, or lands closer to one than the buffer allows, the save is refused with a message telling you which lesson is in the way.

Siblings can be back to back

The buffer is for the gap between families. Two students from the same family, with the same teacher at the same place — the same location, in any room, or both at home — can be booked back to back, one starting the minute the other ends. They still can never overlap, and a different family, or the same family at a different place, gets the full buffer.

Changing a buffer

Use Edit on the teacher's own page under Admin → Teachers. Teachers can also set their own buffer, with their weekly hours, from Settings → Availability in their portal — and a change that would leave a booked lesson too close to another is refused, with the lessons listed.

What blocks a schedule from saving

• The teacher already has a lesson overlapping that slot.

• The gap to the teacher's neighboring lesson is smaller than their buffer — unless it is a sibling at the same place.

• The room is already booked at that time (for in-studio lessons).

Closures

When the whole studio is closed — a holiday, a break, a snow day — add a closure from the calendar rather than cancelling lessons one by one. Lessons on those dates are cancelled, including ones generated later, and billing carries on as usual.