How many students can I take in one CPR class?

It depends on your kit and your staffing, not on the size of the room. The AHA BLS Provider course is designed around three students per manikin with no more than two manikins per instructor, so one instructor working alone tops out around six. The Red Cross builds its First Aid/CPR/AED course lengths around six to ten participants per instructor, allows a maximum of twelve, and requires at least one manikin and one AED trainer for every two participants.

Do the certification bodies tell me how to take bookings or payment?

No. The AHA's Program Administration Manual is explicit that the association neither sets nor receives course fees — the training centre or instructor decides what to charge and is responsible for lawful billing. Neither the AHA nor the Red Cross prescribes a booking system, a payment processor or a refund policy. What they do require is an accurate roster, a student email address for every certificate, and reporting inside their deadlines.

Should I ask whether it is an initial course or a renewal?

Yes, but treat the answer as scheduling information rather than a different product. The AHA does not publish a shorter standalone renewal course for BLS — a lapsed provider sits the same BLS Provider course a first-timer does. Asking still matters because it tells you what the room will be like, and the follow-up question about their current card's expiry date catches people who have let it run out.

Should I take a deposit or the full fee up front?

Full payment up front is the right default for open public dates, because the seat is genuinely scarce and a paid seat is the only reliable headcount. Deposits make sense for private on-site group bookings and for dates months away, where a part-payment holds the slot without asking a company to settle an invoice early. Mixing the two is fine as long as each date states plainly which applies.

What is a reasonable cancellation policy for a paid class?

The published policies across US training centres cluster tightly. A full refund minus a small processing fee seven or more days out, a larger administrative fee inside seven days, and no refund inside forty-eight hours but the option to move to a later date for a rescheduling fee of roughly fifteen to forty dollars. No-shows are generally not refunded at all.

How to take registrations and payment for a CPR or first-aid class

A certification class is not an event with a ticket. The card has an expiry date, the employer is often the one paying, and the manikin count decides how many people you can let in. Here is the booking flow that fits.

A CPR class and a networking event both need a form, a date and a payment button. That is roughly where the similarity ends.

An event sells an experience. A certification class sells a card — a certificate with an expiry date that somebody's employer, licensing board or nursing school is going to check. That changes what you ask at the point of booking, what you file afterwards, and how much it costs you when the wrong person turns up on the wrong date.

It also changes the arithmetic of a seat. A meetup with five more people than expected is a slightly crowded room. A first-aid class with five more is a class you cannot properly run, because you do not have the manikins.

What makes a class different from an event

Three things, and each one leaves a mark on the booking form.

First, there is a paperwork trail after the class that depends entirely on data you collected before it. Red Cross instructors report the course into the Learning Center and must include each participant's email so the digital certificate can be sent. AHA instructors submit a roster to their training centre, and the student should have the eCard within twenty days of the completion date, claimed using the name and email on that roster. A typo in an email field is not an inconvenience here. It is a certificate that never arrives and a phone call three weeks later.

Second, the person attending is frequently not the person paying. Hospitals, care homes, gyms, childcare centres and construction firms all buy training for staff, and their finance departments want a purchase order, an invoice and a named billing contact. A checkout that only knows how to charge a card either loses those bookings or quietly turns them back into email.

Third, people book the wrong course constantly. Heartsaver is the AHA's lay-responder programme, for teachers, coaches, childminders and office first-aiders; BLS is the healthcare-provider course. An employer that asked for BLS for Healthcare Providers will not accept a Heartsaver card, and the person who booked the cheaper one finds out on the day. Your form is the only place that mistake gets caught cheaply.

The fields that actually matter

Most registration advice tells you to ask for less. That is right for an event and wrong here: a certification class has a small set of fields that earn their place, and leaving them out costs more than the friction saves.

Certification body — AHA, Red Cross or HSI. The student is repeating a word from an employer's email; if it does not match what you teach, you both want to know now.
Course and level — Heartsaver, BLS, ACLS, PALS, first aid only, CPR/AED only. Say who each is for beside the option rather than assuming the acronym lands.
Initial or renewal. Scheduling information mostly, but it shapes the room.
Current card: issuing body and expiry date. A renewer already six months lapsed is a better conversation to have before they pay.
Legal name as it should appear on the certificate. Not the nickname.
Email, typed carefully, flagged as the address the certificate goes to.
Who is paying — themselves, or an employer. If employer: company, billing contact, PO number.
Why they are taking it: job, school, licensing board, personal interest. One optional line that tells you which classes to run more of.

Seats and dates: the number is set by your kit

This is the part a general-purpose event form handles badly. Capacity here is not a venue number you pick; it is a function of manikins, AED trainers and instructors, and the certification bodies publish the ratios.

The AHA BLS Provider course is designed around three students to one manikin, with no more than two manikins to one instructor — about six students for an instructor teaching alone. The Red Cross builds its First Aid/CPR/AED course lengths around six to ten participants per instructor, permits a maximum of twelve, and requires at least one manikin and one AED training device for every two participants.

So the cap belongs to the date, not to the course type: the Tuesday you run alone with four manikins is not the Saturday you run with a second instructor and a full kit. Every date needs its own remaining-seat count, it should drop at payment rather than at form submission, and a full date should close itself. Put a waiting list on the full ones — those names are the cheapest demand signal you will get for deciding whether to open another session.

Taking the money

Full payment up front is the right default for public dates. The seat is scarce in a way a webinar seat is not, and a paid seat is the only headcount you can plan kit around.

Deposits belong somewhere narrower: private on-site group training, corporate dates booked months ahead, courses with a heavy materials cost. For employer bookings, let the seat be held against a named billing contact and a PO with the invoice following, rather than pushing a finance department through a card checkout it will refuse to use.

The flow we run for a CPR training business in the US is deliberately two-step. Step one takes the course, the date and the certification details. Step two takes the payment, into the business's own Stripe account, with capacity attached to the specific date so a full session cannot be paid into. That split earns its keep twice: you keep the student's details even when they abandon at the card screen, and the date is checked before you take anybody's money. Refunding someone because your own form sold them a full Saturday is an avoidable way to begin a relationship.

On pricing, the certification bodies leave you alone. The AHA's Program Administration Manual states plainly that the association neither sets nor receives course fees — that is the training centre's or the instructor's decision. What it does require, where fees are charged, is a disclaimer on your promotional materials: use of AHA materials does not represent AHA sponsorship, and the fees, beyond the portion covering AHA course materials, are not income to the association. Put it in the footer once.

The no-show problem

No-shows hurt a capacity-bound class more than an event, because the empty chair was refused to somebody else. If your Saturday BLS caps at six and two people do not arrive, you have run a third of a class and turned two away.

The published policies across US training centres are remarkably consistent, which makes them a template rather than something to invent. A full refund minus a small processing fee seven or more days out. A larger administrative fee inside seven days. No refund inside forty-eight hours, but a transfer to a later date for a rescheduling fee of roughly fifteen to forty dollars. Nothing for a no-show.

Enforcement is not the hard part — visibility is. Put the policy above the payment step, require a tick, and repeat it word for word in the confirmation and the reminder. Almost nobody argues with a policy they have read three times.

Then reduce the number you have to enforce. Two reminders do most of the work: one at forty-eight hours naming the transfer deadline, and one on the morning with the address and start time. The first turns silent no-shows into reschedules, and a reschedule frees a seat you can still sell.

What to send after they book

The confirmation does more work here than for an event, because there are things the student must do before they arrive. Send it immediately, with all of this in it:

Course name, level and certification body in full — this is where a wrong booking gets caught.
Date, start time, duration, address and parking. Say whether late arrivals can be admitted; for a skills course the honest answer is often no.
What to bring: photo ID, their current card if renewing, and for ACLS or PALS the precourse self-assessment printout.
Any precourse work, with its own deadline — the AHA expects ACLS and PALS students to arrive having completed the self-assessment.
What to wear. People kneel on the floor for an hour and nobody warns them.
The cancellation and transfer policy in full, with the deadline as a date rather than a number of hours.
A calendar file.
The certificate timeline, stated honestly: AHA eCards within twenty days of completion, Red Cross certificates usually a day or two after the class is reported.

After the class, and the part most instructors skip

Send one more email on the day you report the class. Name the exact spelling and email you put on the roster, explain how to claim the eCard, and say what to do if nothing arrives by the deadline you quoted. That one email removes most of the admin a training business generates for itself.

Then schedule the one that pays for everything. Cards from the AHA, the Red Cross and HSI all run for two years. Twenty-two months on, your student needs precisely the thing you sell, has bought it once, and has not thought about it since. If your booking data holds the course, the body and the completion date, that reminder writes itself.

None of this needs specialist software. It needs a form that knows about certification levels, dates that hold their own seat count, a checkout that pays into your own account, and an email sequence that fires without you. You can build that on onesol.io or anything else that does those four things — the certification bodies do not care which, as long as the roster you send them is right.