So you've signed up for TimeIt360 and you're ready to create your school's timetable. Before you hit that generate button, let's walk through how to set things up so everything goes smoothly on the first try.
Think of it like building a house — the foundation matters. A few minutes spent setting things up properly will save you hours of fixing things later.
Start With Your Bell Schedule
The first thing to do is set up your bell schedule — the timing of your school day. How many periods do you have? When do breaks fall? What days of the week does your school operate?
If your school has different timings for different groups (say, junior school ends earlier than senior school), you can create separate schedules for each. TimeIt360 handles multiple bell schedules, so don't try to force everything into one.
Quick tip: Get your bell timings right first. Everything else — teachers, subjects, grades — all connects back to this.
Add Your Teachers
Next, add your teachers. You can type them in one by one, or if you have a list ready, upload them all at once using an Excel file.
For each teacher, the important thing is making sure their availability is correct. Most teachers are available all day, every day — so you don't need to do anything special for them. But if you have visiting teachers who only come on certain days or certain periods, make sure to mark their available slots. TimeIt360 needs to know when they're around so it can schedule them properly.
Common mistake: Forgetting to set visiting teacher availability. If a teacher only comes on Mondays and Wednesdays but you don't tell the system, it might try to schedule them on a Thursday — and that won't work.
Add Your Subjects
Now, add the subjects your school teaches. This is straightforward — Maths, English, Science, and so on.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
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Set daily limits where needed. If you don't want a subject like Maths appearing more than once in a single day, you can set that here. This prevents students from having double Maths on the same day.
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Homeroom or Assembly periods — if your school has a fixed morning assembly or homeroom time, add it as a subject and mark it as homeroom. TimeIt360 will place it automatically.
Set Up Your Grades and Sections
Add each grade your school has, along with its sections. Grade 5 with sections A, B, and C? Just add them in.
For each grade, you'll assign:
- Which schedule it follows (the bell timings you set up earlier)
- Which subjects are taught in that grade and how many periods per week each subject gets
- Who the class teacher is for each section
This is where most of the magic happens. When you assign subjects to a grade, you're also telling TimeIt360 which teacher handles which subject for that grade. Take your time here — getting the teacher-subject-grade mapping right is the single most important step.
Watch Out for Teacher Overload
Here's something that trips up a lot of schools on their first attempt: overloading teachers.
Every teacher has a limited number of periods in a week. If you add up all the classes you've assigned to a teacher — across all grades, all sections, all subjects — that total can't exceed the number of periods available in the week.
For example, if your school has 8 periods a day, 5 days a week, that's 40 periods total. If you've assigned a teacher 38 periods of teaching, they only have 2 free periods in the entire week. That's extremely tight, and the timetable might struggle to fit everything in.
A good rule of thumb: Try to keep teachers below 75% of their total capacity. A teacher with 40 available periods should ideally have no more than 30 periods of teaching assigned. This gives the system breathing room to arrange everything without conflicts.
TimeIt360 shows you teacher workload information — use it. If you see a teacher highlighted as overloaded, consider redistributing some of their classes to another teacher before generating.
Use Team Teaching for Shared Subjects
Some subjects are taught by one teacher across many grades — PE, Library, Art, Life Skills. These teachers might appear in 15 or 20 different grades.
When a teacher is spread that thin, it becomes very difficult to find time slots that work for every single grade without conflicts.
The solution? Team teaching. Instead of assigning one PE teacher to every grade individually, group the grades together. For example, all of Grade 7 has PE at the same time with the same teacher. This dramatically reduces scheduling conflicts because the system only needs to find slots for a few groups instead of dozens of individual classes.
If you have any subject where one teacher covers many grades, consider grouping them into team teaching arrangements. It makes a huge difference.
Be Thoughtful With Pre-Assignments
Pre-assignments let you lock a specific class into a specific day and time. Maybe the science lab is only available on Tuesdays, or the music teacher only comes on Fridays. Pre-assignments handle these situations perfectly.
But here's the catch — every pre-assignment you add takes away flexibility. The more slots you lock in advance, the harder it becomes for the system to fit everything else around them.
Use pre-assignments only when something truly needs to be at a fixed time. Don't pre-assign something just because "it's always been on Wednesday" — let the system find the best arrangement.
Subject Groups — Keep Them Simple
Subject groups are for situations where multiple subjects need to happen at the same time. For example, in senior school, students might choose between Physics, Commerce, and Arts — and all three need to run in the same period so students can attend their chosen subject.
When setting up subject groups, remember: every teacher in the group needs to be free at the same time. If you put 6 teachers in one group, the system needs to find time slots where all 6 are simultaneously available. That's hard.
Keep your groups as small as possible. If you can split a large group into two smaller ones, do it. And avoid putting the same teacher in multiple groups — that creates conflicts quickly.
Generate and Review
Once everything is set up, hit generate. TimeIt360 works fast — your timetable will be ready in seconds.
If something doesn't complete, don't panic. The system will tell you which grades or sections had trouble. Most of the time, the fix is simple:
- A teacher is overloaded — redistribute some classes
- A subject group has too many overlapping teachers — simplify the group
- A visiting teacher's availability is too narrow — check their available slots
Make the adjustment, and generate again. It usually takes just one or two tweaks.
Summary
Getting a perfect timetable on your first try comes down to good setup:
- Get your bell schedules right
- Set visiting teacher availability
- Watch teacher workload — keep it under 75%
- Use team teaching for teachers who cover many grades
- Only pre-assign what truly needs a fixed time
- Keep subject groups small and avoid teacher overlap
Take 30 minutes to set things up carefully, and TimeIt360 will do the rest.
Have questions? Reach out to us at support@kvalabs.com or use the chat assistant inside TimeIt360.