Rooms & Facilities

Scheduling a term is really a matching problem: the right course, in a room that's big enough, has what the course needs, and isn't already taken. The Rooms & Facilities tools turn that from guesswork into something you can see and trust. You describe your spaces once — what each room has and how many it seats — describe what each kind of course needs, and from then on the system helps you place sections, keeps a room from being double-booked, manages a waitlist when a section fills, and shows you at a glance which rooms are busy, which are free, and where demand outran the seats you have.

Everything here is optional and progressive. A two-room seminary can ignore almost all of it and nothing changes. A multi-campus school can model every building, match features to requirements, and track the equipment in each room as Assets. You turn on only what helps you.

Overview

There are a few building blocks. Most seminaries use a subset. Notice that a room has features and a course type requires features from the same list — that shared vocabulary is what lets the system match them.

• A Room is your core unit — a space with a name, a number, a seating capacity, and a list of features.
• Campus and Building are optional containers above the room, for multi-site schools and for tidy filtering ("rooms in the Library").
• Room Features are a shared vocabulary of what a room offers. The same vocabulary describes what a Course Type requires, so the two can be matched.
• A Course Schedule (a section) is placed in a room and carries a seat cap; once it's full, students join a waitlist.

The facilities hierarchy (Campus → Building → Room)

You don't have to model buildings or campuses. A room can stand on its own. But if you have more than one site — or just want "rooms in Chapel Hall" to be a thing — build the hierarchy top-down.

Campus

Desk → Campus → New. A campus is a physical site of the seminary.

• Campus Name — what people call it (Main Campus, Downtown Extension).
• Abbreviation — optional short tag.
• Timezone — informational for now. It records the campus's timezone but does not yet change attendance/chapel check-in windows, which still follow the site timezone (see Attendance). It's there so the record is ready for the future.
• Active — untick to retire a campus without deleting its history.

Building

Desk → Building → New. A building belongs to a campus.

• Building Name — Library, Chapel Hall. The same name may repeat across campuses.
• Campus — which campus it sits on.
• Accessible — a quick flag for step-free access.

Room

Desk → Room → New. Beyond the basics (name, number, seating capacity, accessible), a room can name its Building — its Campus then fills in automatically — and list its Room Features. Capacity is the number that drives seat caps and the "is this room big enough?" checks, so it's worth keeping accurate.

What a room has, what a course needs

This is the pairing that makes smart scheduling possible: describe rooms and courses in the same words, and the system can tell you when a room is a poor fit.

Room Features — what a room has

A Room Feature (Desk → Room Feature) is one capability a room can offer: Projector, Sound System, Piano, Whiteboard, Wheelchair Accessible, and so on. Each carries a Category (AV Equipment, Musical, Room Configuration, Specialized) for tidy grouping. A starter set is provided; add your own freely.

On each Room, list the features it actually has in the Room Features table. That's the room's profile.

Accessibility is a feature too. Marking a room Wheelchair Accessible as a feature (not just the old yes/no flag) lets a course require it — see below.

Course Type — what a course needs

A Course Type (Desk → Course Type) groups courses by what they require of a room. Inside it, the Requirements table lists, per modality, the Room Features that modality needs:

Modality	Required Room Feature
All	Projector
Presential	Whiteboard
Hybrid	Sound System

All applies to every modality; the specific rows add to it. So a Presential section of this course type needs a Projector and a Whiteboard.

On each Course, set its Course Type. From then on, every section of that course knows what it needs — and the room picker uses it.

If a course has no Course Type, or a Course Type has no requirements, nothing is lost — the matching simply stays quiet. You add requirements only where they help.

Placing a section in a room

When you set the Room on a Course Schedule, the system works for you in three ways.

A best-fit room picker

The Room dropdown is ordered to put the best fit first and annotates each choice, so you're not picking blind. A row reads something like:

Chapel Hall 101 · cap 60 · ✓ fits · free
Room 204       · cap 30 · ✗ missing 1 · busy

• cap — the room's seating capacity.
• ✓ fits / ✗ missing N — whether the room has the features this course's type requires for this modality.
• free / busy — whether the room is already booked during this section's meeting times.

Rooms that are free, fit, and larger float to the top. Nothing is hidden — you can still pick any room — but the good choices are obvious.

Warnings and hard stops

On save, the system distinguishes "you may want to know" from "this can't be":

• Missing a required feature → a warning. You're told the room lacks something the course type asked for (e.g. "missing Projector"), but the save goes through. Sometimes a substitute is fine, and you're in charge.
• Double-booking → blocked. If the room is already booked by another section at an overlapping time on a shared date, the save is stopped, naming the conflict. Back-to-back classes (one ends as the next begins) are fine.
• Room too small → blocked. You can't move a section into a room that seats fewer than it already has enrolled.

Changing rooms, on the record

Use the Change Room button on a Course Schedule to move a section. It asks for the new room and a reason, and records both in the section's Room Change Log with who changed it and when — so a mid-term shuffle ("projector broke in 204") leaves a trail. Moving a section to a bigger room also lets the waitlist promote into the new seats automatically.

Capacity and the waitlist

This is where rooms stop being decoration and start protecting you from over-enrollment.

The seat cap

Every Course Schedule has a Max Enrollment. When you choose a room, it defaults from that room's seating capacity — but you can override it (a seminar capped at 12 in a 30-seat room) or clear it (no cap). Leave it blank and the section is uncapped, and the waitlist stays dormant.

Alongside it, the section shows three live numbers:

• Seats Used — students who hold a seat (enrolled, plus those who've been invoiced and are paying).
• Registrations — total demand, including drafts and the waitlist.
• Waitlist — how many are queued.

Joining the waitlist

When a section is full, a student who enrolls is placed on the waitlist instead of taking a seat — they see a Waitlisted status and their position (#1, #2…). No invoice is raised for a waitlisted student; they're holding a place in line, not a seat.

Automatic promotion

The moment a seat frees up — someone withdraws, an unpaid seat is released, you raise the cap, or you move the section to a bigger room — the next student on the waitlist is promoted automatically. They (and you, the registrar) are notified. For a paid course, promotion raises their invoice; for a free one, they go straight in. Promotion is first-come, first-served by when they joined.

When the line doesn't clear: "Unseated"

If enrollment closes while students are still waiting, those students move to a terminal Unseated status. That's not a withdrawal — they were never seated — it's simply the honest record that they wanted in and the room couldn't hold them. It powers the Unmet Demand report, your evidence for "we need a bigger room or a second section."

Why this matters. Before, a full course either silently overfilled or turned students away with no trace. Now capacity is respected, the queue is fair and automatic, and every student who couldn't get a seat is counted.

Seeing the whole term: reports

Three Desk reports (each filterable by Academic Term) turn all of this into a registrar's-eye view.

• Room Utilization — every room with the sections scheduled in it, their days and times, and seats vs. capacity — plus rooms with no sections, so empty spaces are visible. This is your tool for shuffling sections around when one room is jammed and another sits idle.
• Waitlisted Sections — every section that currently has a waitlist, with its cap, seats used, waitlist length, and total demand. Your shortlist for "where do we need a bigger room or another section?"
• Unmet Demand — students who waitlisted but never got a seat (Unseated), grouped by section. The hard number behind a request for more space.

Tracking equipment: Asset integration

If your seminary tracks Assets (ERPNext's fixed-asset register — the actual projector unit, the piano, the lab kit), every asset must live in a location. To make that effortless, the seminary mirrors your Campus → Building → Room hierarchy into the asset Location tree automatically. Create a room, and a matching location appears under its building and campus; an asset can then be placed "in" that room with no parallel bookkeeping.

This is controlled in Seminary Settings → Facilities & Assets:

• Sync rooms to Asset Locations — on by default. If you don't track assets, turn it off and no locations are created. Turn it back on and existing campuses, buildings, and rooms are backfilled.
• Root Asset Location — optional. Where your spaces hang in the location tree. Leave it blank to use an auto-created "Seminary Locations" root, or point it at a location you already use.

The mirror is one-way (your rooms drive the locations, never the reverse), and it never deletes a location that still holds an asset. A nice side effect: because a room's features and its assets now share a place, you can reconcile "rooms that should have a projector" with "rooms that actually have one."

Worked examples

Example 1 — A music course that needs a piano

Goal: every section of Hymnody should be placed in a room with a piano, and you want to be warned if it isn't.

1. Make the feature. Desk → Room Feature → confirm Piano exists (Category Musical).
2. Tag the rooms. On each room that has one, add Piano to its Room Features.
3. Describe the need. Desk → Course Type → Music → Requirements: modality All → Piano. Set the Hymnody course's Course Type to Music.
4. Schedule it. When you set the room on a Hymnody section, the picker shows ✓ fits for piano rooms and ✗ missing 1 for the rest. Pick a non-piano room and you'll get a dismissible warning — your call.

Example 2 — A popular elective fills up

Goal: Intro to Counseling has 25 seats; you expect more interest.

1. Cap it. On the section, the Room is a 25-seat room, so Max Enrollment defaults to 25.
2. It fills. The 26th student enrolls and is Waitlisted #1; the 27th is #2. No invoices are raised for them.
3. A seat opens. A seated student withdraws. #1 is promoted automatically, invoiced (it's a paid course), and both they and you are notified. #2 becomes #1.
4. You decide to grow it. You move the section to a 40-seat room with Change Room (reason: "moved to Room 300 for capacity"). The waitlist promotes into the new seats until it clears or the room is full again.
5. The term starts. Anyone still waiting becomes Unseated and shows up in Unmet Demand — your case for a second section next year.

Example 3 — A second campus opens

Goal: model a new Downtown campus and track its equipment.

1. Create Campus Downtown, then Building Annex (campus Downtown), then Rooms with Building Annex — each room's Campus fills in as Downtown.
2. With Sync rooms to Asset Locations on, matching locations appear under Downtown → Annex automatically.
3. Register the Annex's projectors and pianos as Assets, placing each in its room's location. Now equipment, features, and scheduling all line up.

Day-to-day for the registrar

• Add a room. Desk → Room → New. Set capacity and features; optionally a building. That's enough to start scheduling against it.
• Schedule a section. On the Course Schedule, pick the Room (use the ranked picker), confirm Max Enrollment, and save. Heed warnings; conflicts and oversize moves are blocked.
• Find a free room at a given time. Open Room Utilization for the term and scan for rooms with gaps (or no sections at all).
• Manage demand. Check Waitlisted Sections during registration; when a section is over-subscribed, raise the cap, move it to a bigger room, or open a new section. The waitlist promotes itself as seats appear.
• Move a section. Use Change Room (with a reason) — never just blank the field — so the move is logged.
• Justify more space. Bring Unmet Demand to the planning conversation.

Quick reference

If you want to...	Do this
Add a space	Create a Room (set seating capacity)
Group rooms by site	Create Campus and Building, then set the room's Building
Say what a room offers	Add Room Features to the room
Say what a course needs	Set the Course's Course Type; add Requirements (modality → feature)
Place a section	Set the Room on the Course Schedule (the picker ranks best-fit first)
Cap a section	Set Max Enrollment (defaults from the room; blank = uncapped)
Avoid double-booking	Nothing — overlapping bookings of the same room are blocked on save
Move a section, on the record	Use Change Room and give a reason
Let a full course queue students	Just enroll past the cap — extras are Waitlisted and promoted automatically
See who was turned away	Run the Unmet Demand report
Find free vs. busy rooms	Run the Room Utilization report
Track equipment in rooms	Keep Sync rooms to Asset Locations on; register Assets in each room's location
Skip all of this	Leave Course Types, features, and caps empty; turn the sync setting off

Related

• Enrollment — how students enroll, and how waitlist promotion and unpaid-seat release fit the enrollment lifecycle.
• Attendance — check-in time windows and the site-timezone note behind the (informational) campus timezone.
• User Roles — who can manage rooms, course types, and schedules.