Create and run a sign-up sheet

A sign-up sheet replaces the clipboard, the reply-all thread, and the paper grid taped to the classroom door. Teachers and committee chairs can build one in a few minutes; here’s the whole life cycle.

Create the sheet

1. Open Sign-Up Sheets and choose New sheet. (There’s one page for the whole module — the Managing view collects the sheets you run, but you can start a new one from anywhere.)
2. The wizard walks you through it, starting with the kind:
   • Item list — families bring supplies; tracks quantities with partial fulfillment (“12 of 24 juice boxes covered”).
   • Schedule — dated slots with capacity, with an optional first-come waitlist.
   • Appointments — one family per time, built for conferences, with name privacy on by default.
3. Describe it the way a busy parent skims — what, where, anything they must know — and pick the audience: school-wide, a grade, a committee, or the board. You can widen or narrow this later, so a sheet aimed at one grade can grow into a school-wide one without being rebuilt.
4. Add the items or the time slots.
5. Set the behavior: when it opens and closes, the reminder lead time, the self-cancel cutoff, whether there’s a waitlist, whether claimant names are hidden from other families (you always see them), and any per-family cap. Unlisted is here too: an unlisted sheet is live for its audience but appears on no list, so only people you send the link to will find it — useful for a sheet that shouldn’t compete for attention with the rest of the board.
6. Optionally add questions families answer as they sign up (“any allergies?”) — answers land on your roster and in the CSV export.
7. Finish with Save as draft or Publish now. A draft is invisible to families until you come back and publish it, so you can build Tuesday and publish Friday; Publish now hands it to the audience straight away (sign-ups themselves still wait for the open date, if you set one).

Run it

Switch the listing to Managing and you get the sheets you run, grouped rather than piled up: a short Housekeeping list at the top — one row per decision that’s actually waiting on you, and nothing in it notifies families — then your live sheets, then finished ones folded away by year.

Each sheet’s Roster is the working view:

• every claim, answer, and waitlisted family, with Promote and Waitlist to manage the line;
• Message participants — a push to everyone on the sheet, or just one slot (“Reminder: bring items Friday”);
• Export CSV and Print for the day-of table.

Your name is on the sheet — every family who can see it can see who’s running it, on the card, in the sheet’s header and beside their own sign-up. Expect to be messaged, and see it as the feature it is: a question to you beats a guess.

Families edit and cancel themselves until your cutoff; after that, changes come through you. Running the same sheet next season? Duplicate it and publish the copy.

Where a sheet is in its life

Every sheet wears its current state, so a board of sheets doesn’t quietly fill up with finished ones that still look live:

• Draft — only you can see it.
• Opens soon — published, but sign-ups haven’t opened yet.
• Open — taking sign-ups.
• Ended — its close date has passed. Nobody can sign up or cancel; you still have the full roster.
• Closed — you closed it by hand. Same thing, decided rather than arrived at.
• Canceled — called off. Everyone on it is notified, and it can’t be reopened. This is the “it’s not happening” button, not the “we’re done” one.
• Archived — filed away: off families’ pages and out of your active list, with every sign-up, answer and export preserved. Restore one any time.

Wrap up the year

When last year’s sheets are still cluttering your list, Wrap up the year files a whole season in one pass. Tick the sheets worth repeating and next year’s copies are drafted for you while you still remember how each one went. Archiving notifies nobody, and you can restore any sheet one at a time.

Conference season

For conferences across several teachers, create the teachers’ appointment sheets and gather them into a conference season — its own section in the Managing view, one group per season with each teacher’s sheet inside. Copy one time grid across teachers, shift days where needed, and families get the planner view: every teacher, every child, booked in one pass.