Free tool
What does a yard of cut fabric actually earn you?
Put in your landed cost, your bolt length and the yardage you lose per bolt, and see the margin that survives to the register.
Free tool, no sign up
How many hours a month does your class schedule really take?
Count the kit cutting and the classroom resets alongside the teaching hours and the class calendar starts to look like the job it is.
Owners plan the class calendar around teaching time because that is the part that appears on the schedule. The hours that do not appear are the ones that hurt: cutting kits for every registered seat, pressing and bagging them, setting up tables and machines, and putting the classroom back before the shop opens Saturday morning. Those hours are real labor, and they usually land on the owner.
This planner puts a number on the whole load and shows how many seats went unsold at the same time. The two together tell you whether your calendar is ambitious or simply overfull. A schedule that eats fifty hours a month while running at two thirds capacity is a scheduling problem, not a marketing problem.
Your result
Average seat fill, percent
70.0
Below about seventy percent, look at the schedule before the subject list.
Empty seats per month
24
Seats you staffed the room for and did not sell.
Kit cutting and reset hours per month
25.2
The hours that never appear on the class calendar.
Total class hours per month
49.2
Everything the classroom takes out of your month.
If the total is more than a quarter of your working month, the class calendar is a staffing decision and not just a marketing one.
Kit cutting is the hour that hides
Cutting one kit takes an unremarkable amount of time, which is exactly why it disappears from planning. Multiply it by seven students and eight sessions and it becomes the single largest line in the classroom's labor bill. It also has an awkward shape, because it has to happen after registration closes and before the first meeting, which usually means the two evenings you were hoping to spend on the reorder sheet.
Two things reduce it honestly. Cutting in strip sets across all kits at once instead of kit by kit removes a lot of repeated handling, and standardizing kit contents across sessions in the same series means the second and third meetings need far less table time. Both show up immediately if you lower the minutes per kit here and watch the monthly total drop.
Empty seats and the schedule you keep out of habit
Every empty seat still costs the reset time, the teaching hours and often the sample. A Tuesday morning session at four students carries nearly the same labor as the same session at nine, so a calendar full of thin sessions is the most expensive way to teach. The fix is usually consolidation rather than promotion: fewer sessions, fuller rooms, same subjects.
Look at fill rate by day and time before you cut anything. Most shops find one or two slots that reliably fill and one that has been on the calendar for years out of habit. Moving that habit slot into a stronger one, or turning it into an open sew day that needs no kits, recovers hours without losing students.
Questions about this calculator
Should I count a four week series as one session or four?
Four, because each meeting needs its own room setup and reset. Kit cutting usually happens once for the whole series, so lower the minutes per kit to spread that work across the four meetings. That gives a truer monthly picture.
What if a hired teacher does the kit cutting?
The hours still exist, they just cost you money instead of evenings. Keep them in the planner so you can see the full labor load, then decide whether the seat price covers the cutting time you are paying for. Many shops discover the kit fee has not moved in years.
Is a seventy percent fill rate good for a quilt shop?
It is a common working number for an independent shop with a steady class list. Higher is usually a sign of a tight calendar with few sessions rather than better marketing. What matters more is whether the fill rate holds across all your time slots or hides one very weak one.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The bolt count reset checklist for an independent quilt shop
A shelf by shelf routine for getting your recorded yardage and your actual yardage to agree, and for keeping them that way.
That number rests on your bolt record
Whatever this calculator just told you is only as sound as the yardage you believe is on the shelf. QuiltCounter posts the cut at the table so the balance stays right between physical counts, and the reorder alert speaks in bolts and yards rather than abstract stock levels. Book a demo, put the same inputs in against live bolt records, and see the arithmetic run on measured yardage instead of your best estimate.