Tuition Centre Holiday Calendar: Skip Sessions Automatically

Every tuition owner has a holiday story. A teacher turns up on Diwali because nobody updated the timetable. A parent sends an angry message because the class "was cancelled" but their child's attendance shows absent. A batch gets generated for the whole of May even though the centre shuts for two weeks of summer.

The cause is almost always the same: the centre's closed days live in the owner's head, on a WhatsApp group, or on a paper calendar, while the timetable lives somewhere else. TuitionDesk keeps them in one place. You record the closed days once, and the parts of the product that depend on dates respect them. This guide covers what you can set, what it changes, and, just as important, what it does not change.

The four kinds of holiday you can add

Open Settings and find the Holidays section. Each entry has a name (for example "Diwali" or "Summer break") and one of four types.

Type	Use it for	What you enter
Weekly	A regular day off, such as every Sunday	A day of the week
Specific date	A single closure, such as a local festival	One date
Public holiday	A national or state holiday	One date, flagged as public
Date range	Vacation or exam break	A start date and an end date

A few details worth knowing before you start:

• A date range needs an end date after the start date. For a single closed day, use a specific date instead.
• A date range cannot run longer than five years.
• You can edit or delete any holiday later, and you can switch one off without deleting it.

You may not need to start from a blank calendar

When a new centre is created, TuitionDesk pre-fills national public holidays for the country the owner confirms. Dates that move every year, such as Eid or Easter, are entered per calendar year, and the Islamic-calendar dates are estimates that can shift by a day depending on moon sighting. Treat the pre-filled list as a starting point and check it against your own calendar.

Pre-filled rows behave exactly like ones you add by hand, so you can edit or remove any of them. Local closures, such as a state festival, a school's exam fortnight or your own annual break, still need to be added by you.

What a holiday changes

Here is where the calendar does real work.

Area	What happens on a holiday
Generate from schedule	Sessions are not created for holiday dates when you generate sessions from a class's weekly schedule
Adding a session by hand	The date is rejected with a message naming the holiday, so you pick another date
Attendance	You cannot mark attendance on a holiday; the message tells you which holiday it is
Parent portal	Parents see a "Centre holidays" list for the centre

The practical effect is that your registers stay honest. A closed day does not produce a row of absent students, so absence reports, attendance percentages and parent alerts are not polluted by days nobody was meant to attend.

What a holiday does not change

It is better to know the limits than to find them in front of a parent.

• Fees are not paused. Holidays skip sessions, not fee generation. If you want to pause a student's fees for a break, that is a fee action, not a holiday setting. See how to manage fee defaults and the fee reminders guide.
• Sessions that already exist are your responsibility. Add holidays before you generate the term's sessions. If you add a holiday after sessions were created, check the calendar for classes that fall on it.
• Parents are not messaged automatically when you add a holiday. Use an announcement for closures. The notifications guide explains which alerts are automatic.

Import a school or institute calendar (Growth and above)

If you teach students from several schools, or your institute publishes a PDF academic calendar, typing every date is tedious. The holiday import reads it for you.

1. Go to the holiday import page under Settings.
2. Upload a text-based PDF (up to 20 MB), or paste the calendar text.
3. The AI proposes candidate holiday rows. Nothing is saved yet.
4. Review the rows, correct or skip any that are wrong, and approve the ones you want.
5. Approved rows are added; duplicates of holidays you already have are skipped.

Things to know: scanned image PDFs cannot be read, because there is no OCR, and Word files are not supported. Each extraction uses AI credits (5 at the time of writing), and the number of imports per month depends on your plan. The feature is not available on Free or Starter, so check the pricing page for current plan details rather than relying on a blog post. Because the output is AI-generated, always read the proposed dates before approving.

A sensible setup order for a new term

1. Add your weekly off (usually Sunday, sometimes a second day).
2. Confirm or trim the pre-filled public holidays for your country.
3. Add local closures and vacation ranges from your term plan.
4. Only then generate sessions for each class, so closed days are skipped from the start.
5. Tell parents about the longer breaks with an announcement, and point them to the holiday list in the parent portal.

The holiday list belongs to the centre as a whole, not to a branch or a single batch. If you run several locations with different closing days, read the multi-branch guide and plan around that.

Related reading

• Attendance tracking best practices for tuition centres
• Faster attendance with suggested pre-fill and parent leave notices
• Class reminders for teachers and parents
• Summer batch planning for tuition centres

Frequently asked questions

Does a weekly holiday apply to every class? Yes. Holidays belong to the centre, not to a single class.

Can I add a holiday for just one batch? Not through the holiday calendar. If one class is off, cancel or reschedule that session instead.

Will parents see the holidays? The parent portal shows a list of centre holidays.

Is there a free way to try this? Holidays, session generation and attendance are part of the core product. Only the document import needs a paid plan.

Set your calendar before the next term

Add your closed days, then generate sessions so they are skipped from the start. Create your free TuitionDesk account and set up your first holiday in a couple of minutes.