Enrollment Periods are the containers that hold your Programs, Classes, and Waitlists for a given session, semester, or school year. They control what Enrollees see on your Enroll Form and let you reuse, archive, or duplicate an entire enrollment cycle without losing historical data. This article covers when you need more than one, where to find them, what each option does, and two common setup scenarios.
Do You Need More Than One Enrollment Period?
If you offer year-round Open Enrollment, a single Enrollment Period is usually enough. However, creating a new Enrollment Period for each cycle (yearly, seasonal, or per semester) makes it much easier to keep separate enrollments organized and to roll forward from one year to the next.
How Start and End Dates Affect Enrollment Periods
If your Programs or Classes have defined start and end dates — and Enrollees must sign up for a specific period, semester, or cohort — you can create as many Enrollment Periods as you need to keep each one separate.
NOTE: Programs live inside a single Enrollment Period. They are not visible or available in other Enrollment Periods, and Programs cannot currently be duplicated across them.
Where to Find Enrollment Periods
Enrollment Periods are essential whenever your Programs or Classes have start and end dates and you need people to enroll into a specific session.
The Enrollment Period dropdown appears on these pages:
From any of these pages, you can:
Create a new Enrollment Period
Duplicate an existing one
Archive or delete one
If you haven't created an Enrollment Period yet, see How to Create or Duplicate an Enrollment Period — you need at least one before you can create any Programs or Classes.
Enrollment Period Options (Cog Menu)
Clicking the cog icon inside the Enrollment Period widget opens a row of action icons.
Here's what each one does:
Duplicate — Copies all settings, including Programs, Classes, and Waitlists, into a new Enrollment Period that you can rename. This is the fastest way to roll forward into a new school year: duplicate, then adjust dates, fees, or pricing as needed.
Archive — Hides an Enrollment Period from view without deleting any data. Archived periods don't appear on the Enroll Form or in the Customer or Instructor Portals, and any scheduled Class reminders, invoices, or payment events are cancelled. Historical enrollment data is preserved, and you can unarchive at any time from the Archived tab.
Publish / Unpublish — Controls visibility on the Enroll Form. New and duplicated Enrollment Periods start unpublished; publish them when you're ready for Enrollees to see them.
Publishing an Enrollment Period (merged subsection): After creating a new Enrollment Period, open the cog menu and click the eye icon to publish it. Until an Enrollment Period is published, none of its Programs or Classes will appear on the Enroll Form.
NOTE: No Programs or Classes will appear on the Enroll Form until the Enrollment Period containing them is published.
Payment Plans — Lets you attach any number of Payment Plans to the Enrollment Period. Payment Plans are scheduled payment events tied to a date/time; they don't carry their own price. Learn more about Payment Plans.
Edit — Renames the Enrollment Period.
Enrollment Period Templates: Two Common Setups
Enrollment Period Templates: Two Common Setups
What makes Enrollsy a flexible enrollment platform is that each Enrollment Period can be named anything and can contain a completely unique set of Program Options. That flexibility may not sound like much on its own, but it's what lets you run very different program types — group classes, camps, leagues, private lessons — side by side without forcing them into the same structure.
The two scenarios below show common Enrollment Period setups along with the Programs and Classes that fit inside them. For a complete checklist of choices that affect enrollment, see the Going Live Checklist.
Scenario 1 — Program Enrollment with Fixed Schedules
Scenario 1 — Program Enrollment with Fixed Schedules
Suppose I teach school-age basketball during the summer, and every class follows the same structure: Enrollees pick an age group, a schedule, and a time slot. Capturing these choices up front does more than guide the user — it organizes Classes, tracks capacity, and lets me price by grade, age, or time.
Remember: Enrollsy isn't just data intake. It automates tuition, fees, and payment schedules so you don't have to manage any of that after enrollment.
For this scenario, I'd create an Enrollment Period called Group Classes and build Program Options like this:
Program Name
Little Dribblers (Ages 5–7)
Shooting Stars (Ages 8–11)
Board Crashers (Ages 12–15)
Fast Breakers (Ages 15–18)
Schedule
Mon | Wed | Fri
Tue | Thu | Sat
Mon–Sat
Time
Early Mornings (8–10 AM)
Mid-Mornings (10:30 AM–12:30 PM)
Afternoons (1:30–3:30 PM)
Every Program and Class I create inside this Enrollment Period will use these options.
But here's the catch: I also run a Summer League with practices, a tournament, and skill-development private lessons during the school year. Those Programs need a completely different set of Program Options — which is exactly why I'd create a separate Enrollment Period for them.
Scenario 2 — Summer Camp Using Class Selection
Scenario 2 — Summer Camp Using Class Selection
My Summer Camp runs all summer, but families come and go around vacations and other commitments. I'd create an Enrollment Period called Summer Camp with Program Options like this:
Grade Level
8th Graders (Next School Year)
9th Graders (Next School Year)
10th Graders (Next School Year)
11th Graders (Next School Year)
12th Graders (Next School Year)
Since Enrollees pick the camp days they want to attend, grade level is the only thing I need to capture in Program Options. Everything else is handled by Program Settings and at the Class level.
To extend the enrollment experience beyond simple Program selection, I'd switch from Enrollsy's Simple pricing model to the Classes model. I'd also enable "Allow Enrollees to pick their Class(es)," so families can choose specific days without me building rosters or calculating pricing manually.
Then, in Setting enrollment parameters, I'd check "Require enrollment into a minimum or maximum number of Classes" and uncheck "Pricing is the same for each Class" to define the rules.
My Summer Camp rules:
Minimum days per enrollment: 5
No maximum; every day is available until capacity is reached
Daily capacity: 35
Price per day: $20 full day / $12 half day
Registration fee: $25 per student, $10 for the second student, $0 for the third+ student in the same family
Next Steps
Ready to put this into practice? See How to Create or Duplicate an Enrollment Period to build your first one, or Archiving and Deleting Enrollment Periods when it's time to close one out.