Tip of the Month 2025 - February - Sessions!

Goodbye, February! As Valentines month draws to a close, we have decided that this Tip of the Month, we will be taking a look at sessions! The data on your invoices, registers, dashboard, occupancy reports, Dayshare and Footsteps all comes from the booked sessions, so it's really important to understand what you are looking at.

Now, if you're totally new to the system - you will want to learn how to schedule a regular booking pattern. For that, click here. 

Once you have read that, come back and read this!

Session Type Key

When you head to Children > Sessions, you will find a grid which displays the sessions that are booked for the child. There is a key to help you see which session is which. Each session has their own colour.

Regular Sessions are blue - A Regular Session is the booking pattern that the child does on a regular basis and repeats up to every 4 weeks.

Extra Sessions are red - An Extra Session is a one-off session that you can add in in addition to a child regular session.

Nursery Holidays are yellow - A nursery holiday is for Nursery Closures, all children will be affected by a Nursery Holiday, you set these up in Settings > Holidays.

Child Holidays are green - A Child Holiday is book child-by-child and its for when they are off on holiday and won't be attending their session. On the register, a child on holiday with have an (H) next to their name.

Absent Sessions are black - If a child is not attending the session, you can mark their session as absent. This will remove the cost of the session so be careful with the one if you have already processed your invoices.

Room Visits are teal - A room visit is a free session that can be booked in any room that a child is visiting.

Funded hours are pink - When funding is applied over the top of a Regular Session, it will negate the cost of that session. Parents will only pay for the unfunded portion of the Regular Session

Invoiced Sessions are stripey - Once a session has been invoiced, it will have stripes running through it. This way you can see if you have already charged the parent for this session. 

You can use the magnifying glass icons above the sessions grid to zoom in or out depending on how much of the day you want to see. Helpful for any vampire nurseries out there! #TeamEdward

Let's talk a little more about the striped sessions:

As above, the sessions with the stripes on them indicate that this session has been invoiced. A general rule of thumb is that once a session has been invoiced, you don't want to make any amendments to it. Changing a session that has already been invoiced will cause the invoice that session appears on to be credit noted. If you see that a session you thought you had invoiced isn't stripey, you know that a credit note has been raised for this session.

This is a really useful tool because you will know if a session is contributing to the child balance amount based on whether or not there is stripes in the grid!

Session Information

You can hover over the sessions in the grid to see some information about them;

Hovering your mouse over the line will show you the time, room, name of the session as well as if any meals are charged in addition to the rate of the session.

You can also click on the session to see some information about it! You can also delete or mark your session absent from here.

If you're using the Consumables feature, you can tick the "Ignore this session when calculating consumables" and the consumables charge will not be applied to the session when you come to invoice for it!

Creating, Editing and Archiving Session Types

Heading to Settings > Session Types will take you to where you can create, edit and archive your session types. 

Creating a Session Type 

Click on the green plus button to create a new session type. Give your session type a name, a start and end time and the tick the applicable meal boxes.

Remember: Tick the meal box when you want the cost of the meal to charge in addition to the rate of the session. On the invoice, the ticked meal will be in the "Meals" section. If the session cost includes the cost of a meal, you can leave the box unticked.

The session times and the meal boxes cannot be edited later, so make sure you are happy with your selection before you continue.

Editing a Session Type

Click on the Yellow Edit Pencil next to the session type name and the details of the session will populate on the right-hand side of the screen.

Here you can change the session name, the cost, the age bands and the charging structure.

Once you have made a change, the change will take effect from the next invoice that you run. You don't need to worry about any of your invoices being credit noted when making changes to the sessions. However, it is important to note that if you do credit and re-run an invoice, they new invoice will have the new session details.

You can click "Update" to save your changes.

Archiving Sessions

If you have a session type that you no longer offer, you can archive it. To do this, just tick the "Is Archived" tick box and this will move the session type to the archived list. 

Once a session type has been archived, it will no longer be available as a selectable option going forward. Anyone who is on that session type will continue to be so if it is a session type you're no longer offering - make sure that you change the booking pattern for anyone that is already booked onto it!

And there we have it! We hope you learned something new about sessions! Sessions are so integral to how Abacus works so having your head around them goes a long way when you're using the system! Thanks for reading this months Tip of the Month!

As always, the Customer Support Team is here to answer any queries that you might have - pop us a ticket in the Help & Advice section
 or give us a ring on 0800 002 9242 - Option 5!

See you next month!

- The Customer Experience Team

If you found this tip helpful, please let us know by clicking "yes" below!   

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