Capacities in Avela are how you set and track available seats per grade, per school. Seats availability can change as students get offers from specific schools and programs. The capacities view is an evolving, changing view that is meant to help in putting the right students in the right seats, and help inform Staff when making offers if the seats are overflowing.

Capacities getting started

Summary View

1. Navigate to Capacities in your enrollment period in the top left hand side. These are specific to the enrollment period you have selected.

The first screen you will see is a summary view of all capacities across grades in your system. You can toggle between Total and Available Seats.

Org Admins can access a summary view that shows a high-level summary of capacity across all schools in a single table. School Admins will see the same summary view, filtered to only the schools they are assigned to.

The summary view is intended to give a quick read on where seats stand across your organization — useful before running a lottery or making bulk offers.

Total seats represents the overall capacity that you or someone in your organization has inputted.

Available seats represents the capacity available after deducting accepted offers, current offers, and other reserves you may have configured.

Per-school view

1. Navigate to Capacities on the left menu to see the live table.
2. Pick any school you'd like to view capacities for. This may be impacted by your role and permissions. Staff that is assigned to specific schools can only see capacities for the schools they're assigned to.

Total capacity - this is the total capacity number you enter based on the number of available seats.

Offered - this is the total number offered

Accepted - this is the total number of accepted seats

Available Seats - This is the remaining number of seats after accounting for offered and accepted. Available Seats = Total Capacity - Offered - Accepted.

Setting up capacities

For an initial setup, we recommend that you import capacities in bulk. However, if you’d like to start by updating individual capacities, you can do that as well. See editing capacities.

Importing capacities

You can import capacities using a CSV file.

Step 1: Get the template of your capacities by exporting the current capacities which should all be set to 0 when you start. You can select a single row or all rows when exporting capacities.

Step 2:

The CSV contains the following columns:

• ID
• School ID (from a school in Avela)
• School Name (matching the name in Avela)
• Grade ID (from a grade supported by that school in Avela)
• Grade Label (a friendly name for the grade)
• Offered
• Accepted
• Total Seats (input)
• Available Seats

Note: Columns marked with (input) are the fields you are expected to fill in. All other columns pull from existing data in Avela.

1. Update the (Input) columns of your spreadsheet and reimport.
2. Once imported, your Capacities table will be live and subject to changes Staff makes along the way!

Exporting capacities

See Exporting Capacities.

Editing capacities

You can edit capacity input fields directly in the UI.

1. Navigate to Capacities and select a school.
2. Click Edit to enter edit mode for that school's capacity table.
3. Update any input fields (such as Total Seats) directly in the table. Calculated fields like Available Seats will update automatically based on your changes.
4. Click Update to save your changes, or Cancel to discard them.

Important: Updates to total capacities may impact offer-making and capacity filters. You'll be asked to confirm before changes are saved, and this action cannot be undone or recovered.

Capacity History

The Capacity History tab gives Org Admins a transparent log of all changes made to capacity input fields — including who made the change, when it was made, and what value was updated.

This is useful for tracking down unexpected changes or resolving disputes about whether a capacity was set correctly.

What's shown in History:

• The admin or user who made the change
• The timestamp of the change
• The field that was updated, its previous value, and its new value

What's not shown:

• Changes to calculated fields (like Available Seats, Offered, or Accepted) that are driven automatically by student activity in Avela.

When capacities are updated in bulk via import, History will show a summary entry (e.g., "Capacities for 16 schools updated by admin Jake Jones") with the option to expand and see the specific changes within that update.

Access: Capacity History is available to Org Admins by default. School Admins do not currently have access to the History tab.

Seeing capacities when making offers

Once set up, Capacities will warn you when you're making offers for a grade and school that may be overflowing - so you can decide whether to proceed or not.

Seeing only students within capacities

Once configured, Capacities will be something you can filter by in form lists like Waitlists. This way, you can easily see students by Waitlist position that are also within capacity, allowing you to make offers within available seats.