Hello. Our school is preparing to use Blackbaud for the scheduling for the first time. Historically, we have always used a paper schedule and manually moved things around for days until the schedule is "almost" right - just to wait for the first week of classes to see. Our hope is the Blackbaud can help automate the process and give us not just a schedule, but options for schedules. We are an Upper School of about 250 with much larger Middle and Lower Schools. We would like to begin just with the Upper School. Does anyone out there have any suggestions on what information we absolutely need to get into Blackbaud vs. what information would be helpful to make the process more successful. Any suggestions would help.

Scheduling can take some time in The Education Edge, this primarily due to the fact that quite a bit of information has to be setup prior to actually scheduling.  Essentially, the first step is to setup the Academic Year (this means the cycle, timetables, patterns, etc.) need to be in place.  Think of the Academic Year as the foundation from which the rest of scheduling is built upon. 

A basic breakdown of what has to be in the system before you begin can be found in the Scheduling Guide in the User Guides section of the website.