Setting Up Your Co-op

Getting your co-op ready has five main pieces. Each one builds on the last:

1. Name and brand your co-op — logo, accent color, time zone.
2. Create a term — the semester or session your classes live in.
3. Add time slots and rooms — when and where classes meet.
4. Invite members — families and teachers who need accounts.
5. Create and publish classes — then open a registration window.

The last step (classes and registration) is covered in Opening Class Registration. This guide covers everything that happens before that.

The first time you log in as an admin, the setup wizard walks you through five quick steps: naming your co-op, creating your first term, setting up your schedule, inviting families, and a final “all set” confirmation. It takes about 3 minutes.

If you skip or dismiss the wizard, you can do everything it covers manually from Admin. None of it is locked behind the wizard.

After the wizard, your co-op exists but is empty. No members, no classes. The next sections cover how to fill it in.

A term is the container for everything else: classes, registration windows, and schedules all belong to a specific term. You need at least one before you can add classes.

Setting up your very first term is the only time you build one from scratch. From then on, use Copy a termon Admin › Terms & Schedule at the start of each new season instead — it clones the previous term’s time slots and, if you want, its class catalog and teacher assignments, so you’re adjusting what changed rather than re-entering everything. See the Rolling a Term Forward guide for the full walkthrough.

Your join link is how new people get in:

For teachers:Send the same join link. The application form’s Children section is optional. Teachers who skip it get tagged with a Teacher badge in your application queue. When you approve them, they land with the teacher role and no family record. If someone is already a family member in your co-op and also wants to teach a class, don’t change their role. Instead, assign them as the teacher on that class from Admin ’ Class Catalog ’ [class] ’ Teachers. That gives them teaching access to that class while they keep their existing family role. (Roles are mutually exclusive. Switching someone’s role to Teacher would remove their family role, not add to it.)

Go to Admin ’ Applicationsto review incoming requests. Each applicant’s answers, waivers, and student information are all on the same page. Click any row to open them.

Approving creates their account and sends them an invitation email right away. If the term you’re currently working in charges an enrollment fee, the charge is added to their account at that point and they’re prompted to pay it. If that fee is set to required, they can sign in immediately, but they’re blocked from enrolling in classes, RSVPing to events, or signing up for volunteer shifts until it’s paid. The fee belongs to the term, not the co-op as a whole — see “Join fees” below.

You can set up custom questions and required waivers on the Application form tab. Those answers are stored with each application and visible when you review. The tab also lists what the standard form already asks: parent contact info, an optional home address, each child’s name, grade, birthdate, and allergies, how they heard about you, and a note to the coordinator, so you don’t add a custom field for something the form already collects. A Preview button sits at the top of that tab too, so you can check how a change looks right after saving it.

A custom field can be a short text answer, a longer text area, a dropdown, a set of radio buttons (pick one), a set of checkboxes (pick any number, useful for something like “which age groups are you interested in?”), a single checkbox, or a number. Choose whichever matches how many answers you want the applicant to be able to select.

Waivers

Each waiver can be typed directly into the editor, or you can upload a PDF instead if your co-op already has a formatted liability waiver or code of conduct on file. Choose how a family responds too: Ask for a typed signature(they type their full legal name and check a box confirming they’ve read it; a file-based waiver shows an inline preview to read first) or Simple Yes/No agreement, a plain Yes-or-No answer with no typed name — a good fit for something like a photo release, where you just need the decision on record, including an explicit “No.”

Editing a waiver’s wording only affects people who sign after the change; everyone who already signed keeps a record of the exact wording or document they agreed to. If you need everyone — including people who already signed — to sign again (say, a materially different liability waiver), that’s a separate, deliberate step: open the waiver’s row actions and choose Require re-sign. It’s independent of editing the text, so a typo fix never accidentally forces a re-sign. Everyone who already signed is asked again the next time they go through a term-start review.

If your co-op would rather every waiver be signed fresh each term regardless of whether the wording changed, check Re-sign every waiver each termabove the waiver list. It’s off by default — a text edit or an individual Require re-signalready covers most co-ops’ needs without asking families to re-sign things that haven’t changed.

By default, custom fields appear before waivers on the form. If you’d rather applicants read and sign waivers first, each section on the Application form tab has a Move above link that swaps the order for everyone.

Join fees

The enrollment (join) fee belongs to a term, not your co-op as a whole — each term can charge its own amount, because most co-ops don’t expect a family to pay once and be a member forever. Set it on Admin ’ Terms & Schedule: open the term, click Edit term, and fill in the Enrollment fee amount and collection mode. Four modes: no fee, Stripe required before a family can use the co-op, Stripe optional (a charge is added but they can pay anytime — enrolling in classes, events, or volunteer shifts is still blocked until it’s paid), or handled outside the system (you record payment manually and nothing is blocked automatically).

A family can be charged at two different moments: once when their application is approved (if a term is active at the time and it has a fee configured), and again at the start of any later term that also has a fee configured, as part of that term’s review step — see opening a term to families. A returning family with an unpaid required fee is walked straight to checkout right after confirming their information, before they can reach the class catalog.

The Edit term dialog also has a Teacher families are exempt from the join fee checkbox, off by default. Turn it on to waive that term’s join fee for any family with a member who holds the Teacher role at your co-op, whether or not they’re teaching a class that specific term.

Admin ’ Applications ’ Application form still has its own Join feecard, but it does a narrower job now: it just sets the default amount and mode that pre-fills a brand-new term when you create one. Edit a specific term’s fee from Admin ’ Terms & Schedule if you need that one term to charge something different. Changing a term’s fee only applies going forward — families already charged for that term keep the amount that was in effect when they were charged.

Go to Admin ’ Settings to configure everything that makes the app feel like your co-op:

Once your term is created and your first members are in, you’re ready to build your class list and open registration. Opening Class Registration covers creating classes, publishing them, and opening an enrollment window step-by-step.

Other things worth configuring before families arrive:

• Volunteer policy— set shift credit values and the per-family requirement in Admin ’ Volunteer Policy.
• Public page— enable it in Admin ’ Settings so prospective families can find you and apply.
• Application form— add custom questions and waivers in Admin ’ Applications ’ Application form before you share your join link.
• Payment collection mode— choose how class fees are collected (Stripe at enrollment, or flexible billing to their account) in Admin ’ Settings ’ General, under Class enrollment.
• Daily roll call— if your co-op runs as one all-day program rather than à la carte classes, turn on “Enable daily roll call” in Admin ’ Settings ’ General. It adds a Roll Call page to the sidebar where owners, admins, and teachers check students in on arrival and out at dismissal, separate from the per-class attendance teachers take in Teaching.