Booking software for dance studios in Australia: terms, concert season and photo consent

A dance studio runs on a term timetable with a concert at the end of it, which means enrolment, costumes, staffing and cash flow are all set months ahead of the moment anyone dances on a stage.

Most of what makes the year hard is decided at enrolment. Here is what is worth getting right there.

1. Collect photo and video consent at enrolment

Studio marketing runs on photographs of children. Almost every studio collects consent for that in one of two ways: once, at enrolment, in writing, or in a panic in the week of the concert when someone realises.

Make it a real question with a real no. And offer a third option, because a meaningful number of parents will say yes to the image and no to the name, and a yes or no forces them into the wrong answer. A parent who ticked a considered box is a parent who will not object later.

2. Sell the term, keep adults casual

Children's classes belong on term enrolment. It funds the term, secures the place, and tells you in week one how many costumes to order.

Adult open classes are the opposite and pricing them the same way loses the class. Adults do not commit to a concert and will not buy ten weeks in advance; a ten class pass with a long expiry fits how they actually attend. Treating adults as a smaller version of the children's business is the most common pricing mistake in this trade.

3. Price acro differently, because it costs differently

An acro class needs a qualified acro coach and a lower student to teacher ratio. Priced the same as a general jazz class, the expensive product is quietly subsidised by the cheap one, and the more acro grows the worse your margin gets.

The same applies to any class with a specialist requirement or a smaller cap. Charge for what differs.

4. Set class size to the floor, not to the demand

Fifteen in a class works. Twenty-two technically fits, and the quiet one at the back gets nothing out of the term and does not re-enrol. The second number costs you more than it earns, one year later, in a way that never appears on an invoice.

Put the real number on the class so enrolment closes itself, and waitlist the overflow. A place that opens in week three is worth offering automatically rather than discovering empty in week eight.

5. Private lessons are a product, not a favour

Exam preparation and eisteddfod solos both need one to one time, and both tend to get absorbed into a teacher's unpaid hours around the edges of a timetable. Setting them up as a bookable service with a price turns work you are already doing into revenue.

6. What to use

• Purpose built dance studio software handles costumes, concert scheduling, family accounts and sibling discounts in depth. If you run several hundred students and a full production, that depth earns its cost.
• General booking tools cannot usually express a class with a fixed capacity, which rules them out beyond private lessons.
• BookAndGo: classes with real capacity, terms sold as prepaid blocks, casual passes for adults, custom intake including photo consent, waitlists, Australian data hosting and GST invoicing, flat AU$59 per month excluding GST with no per student fee.