What to have ready before you start

Nothing here needs to be perfect. You can change any of it later and regenerate. But having these in front of you is the difference between finishing in one sitting and stopping halfway.

• Your bell times: when each session starts, how long it runs, and when recess and lunch fall.
• Your class list: every class, its year level, and which teacher or teachers own it.
• Staff working days: for anyone part time, the actual days they are at school, not a fraction.
• Your specialist program: which subjects, which classes get each one, and how often.
• Regular meetings: which ones, who attends, and whether they must avoid teaching time.
• Fixed events: assembly, sport, swimming, anything that occupies a slot every week.

You do not need student names, student records, or an export from Compass, Sentral or CASES21. Core timetabling in Bell Path does not use student data at all. That is deliberate: the fastest way to satisfy a privacy review is not to collect the information in the first place.

Setup is built to be completed by a school leader in roughly an evening for a school of about a dozen classes. Larger schools take longer, mostly in the staff step, because that is where the real detail lives. If you get stuck on a step and the next action is not obvious, that is a flaw in Bell Path rather than in you, and it is worth telling us where it happened.