How to take dance class enrolments online

The real cost of a paper or PDF form

A paper form has to be printed, handed out, filled in, brought back, chased when it isn't, read, and then typed into wherever your class lists live. A PDF emailed back is the same job with worse handwriting. Every one of those steps is a place a student goes missing, and the typing at the end is where the errors get in — a misread mobile number is a parent you can't reach all term.

The point of enrolling online isn't that it's modern. It's that the family types their own details once, into the same system that holds the class list, and nobody transcribes anything.

What an enrolment page actually needs

Keep it short. Every extra field loses people, and most of what studios collect at enrolment could be collected later. You need enough to put the student in the right class, contact the family, and know about anything that affects their safety.

• Student name and date of birth, so you can check the age band for the class
• The class or classes they want, with the ones that are full clearly shown as full
• A parent or guardian name, email and mobile
• Medical notes and anything you need to know before they're in the room
• Agreement to your terms, and photo permission if you post class pictures

Show the timetable and the price on the same page

The most common reason an enrolment doesn't finish is that the family had to go somewhere else to find out when the class runs or what a term costs. If your timetable lives on a website that's edited separately from your class list, it will drift out of date, and by Term 2 you're fielding calls about a class that moved.

Keeping the public timetable and the actual class records in one system removes that gap entirely. Change the class time and the page a parent is looking at changes with it.

Handle full classes properly

Hiding a full class loses you the student. Letting people enrol into a class that's already full costs you an awkward email. The middle path is to show it as full and take an expression of interest, so when someone drops out in week three you have a name to call instead of an empty spot.

The same applies to enquiries that don't finish. Someone who started enrolling and stopped is the warmest lead your studio will get all year. If those half-finished enrolments land somewhere you can see, you can follow up while the family is still deciding, rather than never knowing they were interested.

Siblings and families, not just students

Studios bill families, not individuals. If your system treats every student as a separate account, a family with three dancers gets three invoices, three logins and three reminder emails, and your sibling discount becomes a manual adjustment you have to remember every term.

Enrolling a second child should reuse everything you already know about that family. One invoice, one set of contact details, one conversation.

How this works in Olune

Turn registration on and your studio gets a public enrolment page. Families pick classes, enter their details once, and land directly on the class roll — there's nothing to retype. Enquiries that don't complete collect in your leads list so you can follow them up. Siblings attach to the same family record, so fees and messages go out per family rather than per child.