How to manage class packs (bonos) without spreadsheets

Class packs — bonos in Spanish-speaking schools, carnet or pacchetti elsewhere — are the backbone of recurring-class revenue. A student buys 10 sessions up front, shows up when they can, and you get predictable cash flow. Simple in theory. In practice, most schools track them in a spreadsheet that drifts out of sync within a month.

This guide covers how to run class packs cleanly: pricing them, tracking consumption, handling expiry, and turning unused credits into a retention tool instead of a refund liability.

Why spreadsheets break#

A spreadsheet works for the first ten students. Then reception starts guessing:

• Did this student already use today's class, or did someone forget to mark it?
• This pack was bought in January — has it expired?
• The teacher ran an extra session. Whose credits does it come out of?

Every one of these is a small leak. Multiply by a busy term and you have students attending on credits they already spent, and credits expiring silently that you could have re-sold.

Price packs around commitment, not just discount#

The instinct is to price a 10-class pack as "10 × single-class price, minus 15%". That leaves money on the table. A class pack sells commitment: the student pre-pays, which raises their attendance and lowers your churn. Price it as a small discount on the per-class rate, and use the expiry window — not a deep discount — to drive urgency.

A workable structure:

1. Single class — the anchor price, deliberately the worst value.
2. 5-class pack — ~10% off per class, 2-month expiry.
3. 10-class pack — ~15% off per class, 3-month expiry.
4. Monthly unlimited — for your most engaged students.

Track consumption at the point of attendance#

The only reliable moment to decrement a pack is when attendance is taken — not at the desk, not from memory. When the teacher marks a student present, one credit comes off the active pack automatically. That single rule eliminates the "did they already use it?" problem entirely.

If credit consumption isn't tied to attendance, your pack balances will always be wrong by the end of the month.

Make expiry a conversation, not a surprise#

Expiring credits feel like a penalty to students and a refund risk to you. Defuse both with a reminder before expiry — "you have 3 classes left, expiring on the 30th". That nudge recovers attendance you'd otherwise lose and pre-empts the awkward refund request.

What to automate#

If you take one thing from this guide: stop tracking packs by hand. The system should:

• Decrement credits automatically when attendance is marked.
• Show reception each student's live balance and expiry date.
• Flag packs nearing expiry so you can send the reminder.
• Keep an immutable record of every credit sold and spent, for clean books.

This is exactly what ClassWolf does out of the box — packs are a first-class object tied to attendance, not a column in a sheet.