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Start with Operating Hours, then Rooms, Instructors, and Classes. Add constraints and blocked times last. The solver needs hours, rooms, and instructors before it can place anything.

Sets the days and time windows your studio is open. The solver won't place any class outside these windows. Toggle a day off entirely if you don't operate on that day.

Add each physical space the solver can use. If a room has a specific floor type — sprung, marley, or vinyl — set it here. Classes that require a particular floor will only be placed in a matching room.

Add each instructor and set their availability: the days and time windows they're able to teach. The solver won't schedule them outside those windows. Every instructor needs at least one availability window — if none are set, the solver has nowhere to place them and any class assigned to them will fail to schedule.

If you use age groups, you can also mark which age groups each instructor is approved to teach — the solver won't assign them to a class outside their approvals.

Each class has a style, level, and duration. The style controls which instructors are eligible — only instructors who list that style can be assigned. Use Other for classes that aren't a specific dance style (strength, stretching, conditioning, etc.); any instructor can be assigned to an Other class regardless of their listed styles. Optional settings:

• Age group — restricts which instructors can teach it (see Age Groups below).
• Floor type — limits placement to rooms with a matching floor.
• Instructor — set as a preference (solver tries to honor it but can assign someone else) or a requirement(solver will only use that instructor for this class).
• Preferred days — hints to the solver about which days work best, without hard-requiring them.

Age groups are labels you define — for example, Mini, Junior, Teen — to control which instructors can teach which classes. Once an age group is assigned to a class, only instructors approved for that group are eligible to teach it. Age groups are optional; if you don't need this distinction, leave them blank.

Free-text rules written in plain language. Examples: “Ballet before Hip Hop”, “no back-to-back classes for ms. tori”, “Jazz on Tuesday.” The solver treats every matched constraint as a hard rule. If a constraint can't be matched to a real class, room, or instructor by name, it's skipped and a warning appears immediately below the input.

Prevents the solver from using a specific room during a specific window — regardless of operating hours. Useful for recurring commitments like a staff meeting in Studio 1 every Monday morning.

Publishing makes your schedule visible at your live URL (cadence.dance/live/your-studio) and enables the manage page. Until you publish, the schedule is only visible to you in the scheduler.

It finds a schedule that places every class in a room, assigns it an instructor, and picks a time — without double-booking any instructor or room, and while respecting operating hours, instructor availability, and any constraints you've added.

After the solver runs, an amber panel lists any classes it couldn't place, along with a reason for each. These are scheduling conflicts — the solver exhausted every valid combination and couldn't find a slot that satisfied all the rules for that class.

Read the reason shown next to the class name — it points to the specific constraint or availability gap. Common fixes:

• Instructor not available: expand the instructor's availability windows, or assign a different instructor to that class.
• No room available: add another room, extend operating hours, or shorten back-to-back classes to create gaps.
• Constraint conflict: remove or loosen the constraint that's blocking placement, then re-run.

When you enter a constraint in plain language, Cadence tries to match the names you used to your actual classes, rooms, and instructors. If it can't find a match, that rule is skipped and a warning appears immediately below the input. Use the exact name as it appears in your list and try again.

The solver never silently drops a constraint. If a rule makes it impossible to place a class, that class appears in the unscheduled list with a reason explaining what's blocking it. Remove or loosen the constraint causing the conflict, then re-run the solver.

Locking pins a class to its current day, time, room, and instructor. When you re-run the solver, locked classes stay exactly where they are — only unlocked classes are reassigned. The schedule grid shows a padlock icon on any locked class, and an amber banner appears at the top of the results to remind you that locks are active.

Click any class in the schedule grid to toggle its lock. You can also use Lock all to pin every class at once, or Clear locks to release them all. Locks are not saved — they reset if you leave the page.

Locking is useful when you're happy with part of your schedule and want to experiment with the rest without disturbing it. A few common scenarios:

• You like Tuesday and Thursday but want to re-run the solver for Monday only — lock everything on Tue/Thu first.
• An instructor updated their availability and you want to re-solve just their classes — lock all the other instructors' classes first.
• You have one unscheduled class and want to experiment with loosening constraints without the whole schedule reshuffling — lock all and then unlock just the problem class.

The manage page lets you make changes to specific weeks without touching your base schedule — cancel a class for a holiday, swap an instructor who called in sick, add a makeup class, or adjust a time. Your base schedule stays intact; the manage page layers changes on top of it.

This week applies the change only to the selected week. Every week through a date repeats it each week from the selected week up to and including that date (up to 26 weeks) — for things like a teacher on leave for six weeks or a class paused until a date. Permanent applies it to every week going forward until you undo it. Use permanent for ongoing changes like a new instructor assignment; use this week for one-offs like a snow day. A dated change shows “Weekly through” its end date in Active Changes, where you can undo a single week or Undo all weeks at once.

Click + Add at the top of any day, fill in the details, and choose whether it's a one-off (this week only) or permanent. The class will appear with an Added badge on the live display.

It creates a modify override for every class taught by the outgoing instructor — in one step. Useful when an instructor is out and someone else is covering all their classes: make it permanent, or pick Every week through a date for a leave of several weeks. A coverage check shows any time conflicts for the replacement — in every week the change covers — before you confirm.

Two classes are double-booked in the same week — the same instructor or the same room at overlapping times, usually after a one-off change or a newly published schedule landed on top of an existing change. Each conflict lists both classes; click either one to jump to it and fix it (move it, swap the instructor or room, or undo the change). The box disappears once nothing overlaps.

Each change appears in the Active Changes list at the bottom of the page. Click the trash icon next to any change to remove it.

After editing your base schedule, you need to re-run the solver and publish the new schedule. The manage page always reflects the most recently published schedule.

An in-app AI assistant, available on the Pro plan and above. Open it from the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of any page. Ask it to cancel a class, substitute an instructor, find an open slot and add a one-off lesson (like a private), answer questions about your schedule and roster, or ask how to do something in Cadence.

Anything about your studio’s actual data: what’s on the schedule for a day, room, class, or instructor; what changed this week (a cancellation or substitution you confirmed); how booked a room or instructor is; open time slots in a room or an instructor’s schedule; who’s enrolled in a class or hasn’t been assigned one yet; and one student’s attendance record. It can also look back — ask what happened last week, not just this week or next.

Yes — click the paperclip icon next to the message box, or drag and drop a file straight onto the chat window, to attach a photo or screenshot (PNG, JPEG, or WebP) or a PDF (up to 3MB), then ask your question about it.

Attach (or drag and drop) a screenshot, PDF, CSV, or text file of a roster or student list and ask Cue to add them — it pulls out names and details and opens the same review screen as the Import button on the Students page, so nothing is saved until you confirm it there. An attached file stays available for one follow-up reply, so replying “yes” after Cue asks “want me to import this?” works without re-attaching — but attach it again if the conversation moves on to something else first. For adding just one student, it’s faster to use the Students page’s “+ Add Student” directly.

No. Every change it proposes — a cancellation, a substitution, a new class — is a draft with a Confirm and Cancel button, right in the chat. Nothing happens to your schedule until you explicitly click Confirm; Cue only ever prepares the request.

Closing the chat panel doesn't stop it. A spinning ring on the Cue button shows it's still working, and a number shows how many drafted changes are waiting for you. Your conversation stays as you move between pages. If you reload, the conversation is cleared, but any drafts from the last day that you haven't confirmed or cancelled come back when you reopen Cue.

Multi-week, yes: ask something like “Megan is covering Ella's Thursday jazz for the next six weeks” and Cue drafts one change that repeats every week through the end date, after checking the substitute isn't double-booked in any of those weeks. For a teacher with several classes, Cue drafts one card per class, and a Confirm all button applies them together. Permanent changes, no — for a new ongoing instructor assignment, use the manage page directly.

Cue asks which one you mean instead of guessing — for example, if you ask to cancel “the jazz class” and there are two on the schedule, it lists both and waits for you to pick.

A dropdown appears at the top of the chat whenever you have more than one studio, defaulted to the one you most recently worked in. Switch it any time before asking your question.

It's your roster — the students at your studio and which classes each one is enrolled in. Attendance is taken against this roster, so a student needs to be added and enrolled in a class before anyone can check them off for it. Reach it from the Students button on a studio card on your dashboard.

Click + Add Student and fill in their name — first and last name are the only required fields. Date of birth, parent contact info, and notes are all optional.

Yes, on the Pro and Studio Group plans. Click Import Students, then upload or drag in a screenshot, PDF, CSV, or text file — or paste a roster straight from another system. Cue pulls out names and details (level, parent contact info) and shows them on a review screen where you can fix or remove anyone, and pick classes for each student, before importing. Nothing is added until you confirm. Anyone whose name is already on your roster is skipped rather than added twice, so importing the same file again won't create duplicates — if it really is a different student with the same name, choose “add as new” on that row.

Yes, if your file shows which classes each student is in — for example, a roster export with one class per page, or a spreadsheet with a Courses column. Check Also match students to their classes before extracting. Cue matches each class in your file to one of your Cadence classes, and you confirm or change every match (or choose “Don't enroll”) on a first step before reviewing students. You can still change any one student's classes on the next step. Students already on your roster are added to their classes rather than duplicated, and their existing classes are kept — so you can re-upload a roster you already imported by name just to fill in classes. Cadence never creates new classes from an import; add any missing ones in the Schedule Builder first.

The Students tab is student-first: open one student and check which classes they're in. The Classes tab is class-first: pick a class and check off everyone enrolled in it at once — faster when you're building out a new class's roster rather than updating one student.

Click the trash icon on their row and confirm. This takes them off the active roster and every class's attendance list — it doesn't delete their past records.

Two ways, depending on who's taking it. As the owner: open Manage Schedule, click a class, and choose Take Attendance. As a teacher: from your portal, click Take attendance next to the class under Today or This Week. Either way you're checking students off the same roster, so attendance stays in sync no matter who takes it.

Click any column header — Name, Age, or Classes — to sort by it. Click again to reverse the direction. Students with no birth date on file always sort to the bottom of an age sort, in either direction.

Open the Attendance tab on the Students page — its Overview sub-tab shows your studio's overall attendance rate, how many classes and students are currently flagged, and a week-by-week trend chart across the same trailing period as the By Class and By Student breakdowns.

From the Attendance tab, switch to By Class. It lists every class's attendance rate over the trailing 8 weeks, worst first, and flags any class below 80% as Needs attention. Click a class to see its week-by-week breakdown, including how many of the absences were excused.

Both — switch to By Student for a table sorted the same way but by student. A student's rate is combined across every class they're enrolled in, so someone who's fine in Ballet but skipping Tap still shows up flagged overall. Click a student to see which specific class contributed to each week's absence.

Yes — click any column header (the class or student name, Weeks tracked, or Rate) to sort by it, and again to reverse direction. Until you pick a column, both tables default to worst-rate-first, and any class or student with no attendance data yet always sorts last regardless of direction.

Once invited, a teacher signs in and lands on their own portal — separate from the owner dashboard — where they can see their schedule, take attendance, call off a class, manage enrollment for classes they teach, and request availability changes.

Today shows only classes happening today, so the class you're about to teach — and its attendance/call-off actions — is always at the top. This Week and Next Week show the full schedule for planning ahead; the same class can appear in both Today and This Week since Today is just a filtered view of the same data.

Click Call off next to the class, add an optional reason, and submit. Your studio owner is notified to review and approve — if there's an eligible substitute, they'll see that suggested automatically. If you teach multiple classes on the same day, Call off day lets you call them all off in one submission instead of one at a time.

Lists every class you teach with a Manage roster button — add or remove existing students from that class. You can't create new student records or edit a student's contact info from here; that stays with your studio owner on the Students page.

The first time you sign in, you'll set your name, the styles you teach, and your weekly availability. After that, use Request availability change to propose new hours — your studio owner reviews and approves it before it takes effect.

Anyone with the link. It's public and requires no sign-in — designed to be put on a TV or shared with parents and instructors.

It updates in real time. When you make a change on the manage page, the live display reflects it immediately — no refresh needed.

You can set your studio name and accent color in the Branding section of the scheduler. Additional customization options are on the roadmap.