A summer camp does a year of admissions in about seventy-two hours, then runs for ten weeks, then stops. Almost no class management software is designed for that shape.
Schools enrol continuously. Camps do not. Registration opens, and a very large share of the season's places go in the first few days - often the first few hours for popular weeks.
That makes two things critical that barely matter elsewhere: the registration form has to work under load and on a phone, and capacity has to be enforced in real time. A camp that oversells week three by four children has a genuine problem, not a rounding error.
It also means waitlists are not optional. When week three fills in an hour, the waitlist is where the next twenty families go, and how you manage it determines how many of them come back next year.
A camp sells weeks, or fortnights, or day-rates. A family might book weeks one, two and six, skip the rest, and add week seven in June. That is a different enrolment model from a term.
The billing shape follows: a deposit at registration, a balance due before the season, per-week pricing with sibling discounts, and refunds or credits when plans change - which they always do.
The operational consequence of a ten-week season is that there is no time to fix anything. A school discovering in October that its attendance process is clumsy has until next September. A camp discovering it in week two has eight weeks and no slack.
This is why camps benefit disproportionately from setting up properly before the season rather than during it, and why "we will figure it out as we go" is more expensive here than anywhere else.
Camps collect more per-child information than any other teaching business: allergies, medications, emergency contacts, photo permissions, swimming ability, collection authorisation. Much of it is legally significant and all of it must be findable in seconds by a counsellor who is not at a desk.
Custom fields on the student record are the difference between that being a solved problem and being a lever-arch file in the office.
"What happens when week three sells out?" Real-time capacity and an automatic waitlist, or an oversell you find later?
"Book weeks one, two and six for two siblings." Native, or six separate enrolments?
"Take a deposit now and the balance in May." A billing schedule, or two manual invoices?
"Show me every child with a nut allergy in week four." A query, or a folder?
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