Create and run a sign-up sheet
For teachers and organizers: building an item list, schedule, or appointment sheet, publishing it, and running the roster through to done.
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
- Open Sign-Up Sheets, switch to the Manage tab (organizers only), and choose New sheet.
- 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.
- 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.
- Add the items or the time slots.
- 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.
- Optionally add questions families answer as they sign up (“any allergies?”) — answers land on your roster and in the CSV export.
- Save. It’s a draft — nobody sees it or gets notified until you publish from the Manage tab, so build Tuesday, publish Friday.
Run it
The Manage tab keeps score across your sheets — what’s filling, what needs help, what’s still a draft. 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.
Families edit and cancel themselves until your cutoff; after that, changes come through you. When it’s over, Close the sheet (reopen if you were hasty). Canceling a sheet notifies everyone on it — that’s the “event’s off” button, and it can’t be reopened. Running the same sheet next season? Duplicate it and publish the copy.
Conference season
For conferences across several teachers, create the teachers’ appointment sheets and gather them into a conference group (the Conferences tab): copy one time grid across teachers, shift days where needed, and families get the planner view — every teacher, every child, booked in one pass.