In most schools, students' music lessons need to be on a rotating schedule so that they don't miss the same class every week. Here is how Music Monitor manages this.

For guidance on the timetabling process more generally, see Manage Timetabling.

See also Manage Timeslots for guidance on some of the setup required.

The Rotation Tag is a field in the Tuition Enrolments file.

A lesson with no Rotation Tag selected will default to a fixed, weekly schedule. You have options to set lessons instead to an Alternating, Rotating, or Fortnightly schedule.

An alternating timetable is one that has two different fixed times and alternates week by week between those two times.

This function makes use of the inbuilt function in FileMaker that numbers the weeks of the year. Weeks are then labelled as "Odd" or "Even" weeks.

To check which week of the year a particular date falls in, go to Home > Setup Files > Calendar and look at the Week of Year field.

To add an enrolment to a teacher's Schedule, you select it from the Unallocated Students list. Once you have added the enrolment to the Schedule, it no longer appears in the list.

However, if you give an enrolment the Rotation Tag of "Alternating", you will be able to add it twice to the Schedule.

You can filter the Schedule to show only Odd or only Even weeks.

Make sure you add the enrolment once in an Odd week and once in an Even week.

Fortnightly lessons will be set to occur on either an "Even" week or an "Odd" week. This refers to the week of the year, not the week of the term (as above). You will need to check each year whether the odd/even weeks of term match the odd/even weeks of the year or are opposite.

If you choose a rotating schedule, the lessons will rotate through the teacher's available times, moving later each week and coming back to the earliest time after it reaches the end.

As described in the timetabling overview article, the Schedule is a template of the teacher's timetable, and then each week's timetable is produced by a process to create Calendar Entries.

The Rotation Tag affects the creation of the Calendar Entries (and from there the creation of Attendance records and rolls).

*New in 2026!* From version 9.288 onward, there are two different options for how lessons should be rotated across the term. The default that most existing users have been used to is called "Fluid Offset Rotation" and the new option is called "Fixed Slot Rotation".

This choice is sytem-wide and is set at Home > Settings > General Settings > Timetable Rotation.

Whichever of these options you choose, you will just set the Rotation Tag for enrolments to "Rotating" and the rotation function will operate according to the selection you have made here.

This is the usual method people mean when they talk about rotating lesson times, and is the default setting in Music Monitor.

In this method, you specify the amount by which each lesson will rotate. The script that creates the calendar entries for rotating lessons will slot the enrolment in at a later time each week. First it will attempt to offset from the previous week's entry by your specified amount. But the script will check for any existing calendar entries and skip over them if they are there. It will also avoid any times allocated to fixed enrolments - whether or not these have been added yet to the calendar.

Apart from those reserved times, the rotation function will use all of the teacher's availability. On each day, it will start from the earliest timeslot in the teacher's schedule, and use times up until the latest timeslot in the teacher's schedule. Even if you have not created all the timeslots in between the first and last of the day, rotating lessons will fill the intervening times. If you want to avoid particular times being used in rotating lessons, enter text (such as "BREAK") into those timeslots.

The rotation function only rotates across timeslots within one day. Lessons on another day will rotate among themselves but not across days.

*New in 2026!* From version 9.288 onward, this option is available.

In this method, you set up the teachers' Schedules with pre-defined timeslots (typically school periods). The rotation function then rotates the lessons into these timeslots. Regardless of how long or how far apart your fixed timeslots are, the rotation function will work through them in order.

This method also has a Fixed Slot Skip Count setting. If that is set to 2, for example, the rotation function will use every 2nd slot instead of every slot.

In the Fixed Slot Rotation method, lessons that are longer than the timeslot they are placed into will be truncated to fit in the timeslot. Music Monitor will fill out the same lesson adjustment information that teachers also have access to, showing the actual length of this lesson. This means the correct amount will be calculated for payroll and billing based on the Attendance record.

If a timeslot that a lesson should be rotated into is already taken, the Fixed Slot rotation function will skip that timeslot and move to the next one. If it checks the whole day and is unable to find an available slot, it will schedule the lesson in the first slot that it found, causing a clash that the teacher or administrators will see as an alert on the schedule.

You can set the Rotation Tag at the time you're enrolling a student, even if you don't yet know the lesson time.

In the enrolment window, select the green Timetabling button and select the Rotation field.

Setting that field now will make the timetabling process smoother, because you will want the option to timetable the fixed lessons first before you embark on the rotating ones.

For more detailed guidance on scheduling and calendar entries, see: