1. What is vPlan?

vPlan is a free timetable scheduling platform built for VTU-affiliated colleges. It takes the messy, spreadsheet-driven job of building a college timetable and turns it into a few clicks.

You feed it the building blocks of your college — departments, sections, courses, instructors, rooms, and teaching slots — and vPlan's constraint solver produces a conflict-free timetable in seconds. No two rooms double-booked. No instructor teaching two places at once. No student section caught in a clash.

Good to know: vPlan is completely free for all VTU-affiliated colleges. There are no hidden charges, no credit card required, and no student count limits.

2. Create your account

Everything starts with an account. Here's how:

  1. Open the sign-up page — click Sign up in the top-right corner of the homepage.
  2. Choose Google for one-click registration, or Sign up with Email if you prefer a password-based account.
  3. Verify your email (if you registered with email) and finish the one-time setup.
  4. You're in. You'll land straight on the dashboard, ready to build.

Use a personal, accessible email — your institution account should stay reachable by the colleague who takes over scheduling next semester.

3. Meet the dashboard

After login you'll see the vPlan dashboard. The left sidebar is your command center:

  • Dashboard — an overview of your data and recent activity.
  • Create Timetable — the heart of vPlan; where you configure and generate schedules.
  • Teacher Mapping — tie instructors to subjects and departments.
  • Courses, Instructors, Rooms, Meeting Times, Departments, Sections — manage the six data entities.
  • Holidays — exclude festival and exam dates from generation.

Everything is keyboard-friendly too — press Cmd/Ctrl + K to open the command palette and jump anywhere instantly.

4. The five core entities

Before you generate anything, vPlan needs your college's data. Think of it as the ingredients list. Get these right and generation is effortless:

Departments

A department groups related sections and courses — for example Computer Science or Electronics & Communication. Create each department that runs timetables.

Courses

Every subject taught in a department, such as Data Structures (CSE-301) or DBMS (CSE-401). Each course is linked to its department, section, and credits.

Instructors

Your faculty. Add each teacher who takes classes. vPlan will later use these records to make sure no instructor is double-booked.

Rooms

Every classroom, lab, or hall that can host a lecture. vPlan makes sure a room is never scheduled for two sections at once.

Meeting Times

The teaching slots in your college day — from 9:30–10:30 through the afternoon. vPlan fills these slots using your configured working days.

Pro tip: Don't want to type all this by hand? vPlan's Excel import lets you upload courses, instructors, and rooms from a spreadsheet in one go. See the article How to Upload Excel Data.

5. Your first 30 minutes

Follow this order and you'll have a working timetable within half an hour:

  1. 1Add a department — start with just one (e.g. Computer Science).
  2. 2Add a section — e.g. "CSE — Section A".
  3. 3Add 3–4 courses for that section.
  4. 4Add 3–4 instructors who teach those courses.
  5. 5Add a couple of rooms.
  6. 6Add meeting times — the default slots will be pre-filled.
  7. 7Open Create Timetable, review the config, and hit Generate.

That's it. The solver will return a fully assigned schedule — and if anything can't be placed, it tells you exactly why, so you can fix the data and regenerate.

6. Where to go next

Ready to go deeper? These guides build on what you've learned: