Understanding organizations, enrollment periods, and forms

Avela Apply, Match and Enroll are organized around three layers: The organization, its enrollment periods, and the forms inside them. Knowing what lives at each layer tells you where to go to set something up - and what carries over from year to year versus what you configure fresh each cycle.

The organization

Your organization is your permanent home in Avela. It holds everything that persists across school years:

• Schools - the master list of your sites
• Grades
• Programs (optional)
• Students and parents - people belong to your organization, not to a single cycle, so returning families keep their accounts and history
• Teams and members -  staff users and their access
• Branding, organization policies and toolings, terminology - logos, colors, settings and any custom terms

You set these up once and reuse them every cycle.

Enrollment periods

An enrollment period is one admissions cycle - typically a school year, like 2026–27. Your organization can have many enrollment periods over time, but families only see (and interact with) the ones marked active.

Inside an enrollment period, you configure how this specific cycle works:

• Enrollment schools - combining which grade levels (and programs) each school  offers
• Capacity - how many seats are available per enrollment school offering
• Forms - what families fill out so the organization can collect anything from Applications to Transfer requests, or Intents to return to Enrollment forms

When a cycle ends, you don't delete anything - you create a new enrollment period for the next year and mark the old one inactive. Your schools, programs, and families are already in place; you only redo the cycle-specific setup.  Learn more about Importing Enrollment periods to rollover.

Forms

Forms live inside an enrollment period. You design a form once - its sections, questions, school ranking, and eligibility rules - and publish it when it's ready for families. Learn more about how to Draft forms.

One detail that surprises many staff members: deadlines live on the form, not the enrollment period. Each form has its own open date, close date, and offer date. This means two forms in the same enrollment period - say, a kindergarten application and a transfer request - can run on completely different timelines.

Form responses

When a parent starts a form response, like an application, they choose their student, the enrollment period, and the form; their answers, school rankings, and eventual offers all live on that student's form response. A student can only have one form response of each type per enrollment period, so there's no risk of duplicate applications.