Sessions break a booking event into time slots that parents pick from. Use them whenever the event has fixed appointments — parent-teacher interviews, careers chats, music auditions, anything where one parent meets with one staff member at a specific time.
If your event is a flat RSVP (one count for the whole thing) you don’t need sessions. Set the event’s capacity instead.
Auto-generating sessions
The fastest way to create sessions is to let PortalHQ generate them for you.
From the event detail page, find the Sessions section. Fill in:
- Capacity — the per-session capacity. For one-on-one interviews this is normally 1. For group sessions with multiple people per slot, set the actual capacity (e.g. 4 if four families can attend each slot).
- Session length (minutes) — how long each slot is. Typical PTI slots are 10 or 15 minutes.
- Session break (minutes) — optional gap between slots. Use this to give the teacher a break or to allow late-running interviews to catch up. Set to 0 for back-to-back slots.
Click Generate sessions. PortalHQ creates as many sessions as fit between the event’s start and end times.
Example
A PTI event runs 2 pm–5 pm (3 hours). With session length 15 minutes and session break 0, you get 12 sessions:
| Slot | Time |
|---|---|
| 1 | 2:00–2:15 |
| 2 | 2:15–2:30 |
| … | … |
| 12 | 4:45–5:00 |
With session length 15 and session break 5, slots are 15 minutes long with a 5-minute buffer, giving 9 sessions in the same window.
Adding or removing sessions manually
After auto-generation you can fine-tune:
- Delete a single session — useful for blocking out a teacher’s break. The session is removed and parents can’t book it.
- Delete all sessions — wipe the slot list and start again. Any submissions on those sessions are cancelled. Use this if you got the parameters wrong on the first try.
Changing sessions after parents have booked
Once parents start booking, be careful:
- Deleting a session cancels every booking in that session. Parents are not automatically notified — let them know directly.
- Changing the event’s start/end window has no effect on existing sessions; they keep their original times.
- If you need to rebuild the slot list, export the bookings first so you have a record, then delete all sessions and regenerate.
When sessions are full
A session is full when the number of active bookings equals its capacity. Full sessions are still visible to parents but show as unavailable. They can pick another slot or cancel and rebook if they want to swap.
The event as a whole shows as full only when every session is full (or when you’ve manually ticked Full on the event).
Sessions vs. event capacity
If your event has sessions, the event’s Capacity field on the form is ignored. The effective capacity is the sum of session capacities.
If your event has no sessions, capacity is the number you set on the event itself.
What parents see
For events with sessions, parents pick a slot from a list of available times before filling in the form. For events without sessions, parents go straight to the form.