How many sessions get diarised

Diarise lays a plan's sessions across the year's terms. How many it lays is a choice on the service type rather than on the plan — Diarise mode — and it is offered on tuition service types only.

Where to find it: Settings > Activity > Service Types, on the Detail tab

The three modes

Diarise mode	What Diarise lays
Diarise the sessions set for each term	Each term's sessions, exactly as it always has
Fit as many as each term allows, up to its sessions	Each term's sessions where they fit, and fewer where they do not
Fit as many as the year allows, up to a yearly maximum	Sessions in date order from the start of the year, until the year's maximum is reached

Every service type you already have is set to the first one, so nothing changes anywhere until somebody chooses otherwise.

The term's sessions become a ceiling

In the second and third modes, the sessions set against each term are the most that term may have — not a number Xperios will try to reach. Diarise never writes back what it actually laid, so the figure you typed stays as you typed it and the diary holds what fitted.

The plan's Schedule tab shows both, so you can always see the difference:

Diarise mode	Scheduled sessions reads
Each term's sessions	12 (12 laid)
Up to each term's sessions	Up to 12 (11 laid)
Up to a yearly maximum	Up to 36 in the year (31 laid)

When a term does not fit

A term runs out of room when its sessions, at the plan's frequency, would run past the end of the term or the end of the plan. What happens then is the whole point of the choice:

• Diarise the sessions set for each term — the term is short, and Diarise now says so, one line per term: Term 2: 11 of 12 sessions fit. That warning is new; until now a term quietly came up short and nothing told you.
• Fit as many as each term allows — the same lessons are laid, and nothing warns, because a short term is what you asked for.

The warning is the one thing to read after a Diarise

It is per term, and it names the term. If you did not intend a short term, the fix is nearly always the plan's frequency, its end date, or a non-working date that landed inside the term — not the session count.

Up to a yearly maximum

The third mode stops counting terms and counts the year. Diarise lays in date order from the start of the year and keeps going, term after term, until the year's maximum is reached. Then it stops.

Two things follow from "in date order", and both surprise people the first time:

• Earlier terms spend the allowance. If the autumn term takes more than its share, the summer term gets fewer sessions, or none at all. That is the mode working, not a fault.
• Re-laying part-way through the year gives you what is left. Diarise from term 3 and term 3 receives only what terms 1 and 2 did not already use. The lessons already in the diary count towards the year.
• A lesson you delete by hand still counts against the maximum. The year is counted by session number rather than by how many lessons are actually there, so deleting one leaves a gap that is still treated as used. Diarising from a later term will not give it back; diarising the whole year again will.

Maximum sessions in the year appears on the plan's year only in this mode. A new plan starts with the year's default term sessions added together, which you can then change.

A plan with no maximum is created with no sessions

Create a plan in this mode with the maximum left at nothing and it is created empty, and Diarise refuses it: Set the maximum sessions for the year before diarising. Put the maximum in and diarise it again.

Enforce applies to the first mode only

The Enforce tick — which piles any sessions that will not fit onto the last teaching day rather than dropping them — belongs to Diarise the sessions set for each term. In the other two modes it is ignored, because squeezing in a session that does not fit is the opposite of what they are for.

For the same reason, the warning about a schedule that no longer matches the school's agreement shows in the first mode only.

A school-billed service type needs the right kind of rate

A school-billed (Indirect) service type set to up to a yearly maximum can only use a rate billed by Diary. Rates billed by Schedule are not offered on such a plan, and are refused if one is laid.

The reason is worth knowing, because it is about an invoice rather than a diary: a rate billed by Schedule charges the school from the term session counts and the agreement, not from the lessons delivered. In this mode those counts are a ceiling that the diary is expected to come in under, so charging from them would invoice the school for sessions nobody taught. A rate billed by Diary charges for what was delivered, which is the only thing that can be right here.

What it does to the money

For directly billed tuition on a per session rate, the charge is built from the lessons in the diary — so in the second and third modes a payer is charged for what was laid, not for what the term's count says. Nothing about the rate changes; the number of sessions in the fee does.

A per-term or per-year rate is unaffected: the charge is the same whatever the diary holds.

See How a fee is calculated for the whole order of events, and Diarise for running it across a year.