How to grant access to a course on a specific date

Sometimes you don’t want students to access your course immediately after purchase or enrollment. You may prefer to open the course on a fixed future date — for example for a live launch, a challenge, a cohort-based program, or a seasonal release.

On systeme.io you can easily schedule the exact day when students will receive access to a course. This feature is available when you sell the course through a sales funnel.

Here is a complete and detailed guide.

1. Open the order form of your sales funnel

Log in to your systeme.io account and open the sales funnel you use (or will use) to sell the course.

Go to the Order form (payment page) step of that funnel.

Make sure the offer type is set to Digital product.

2. Add the course as a resource

In the order form settings, go to the Resources section and click the + button to add a new resource.

Select Courses, then choose the course you want to sell.

Choose the access type you want to give (Full access, Drip content, Partial access, or Partial access with drip). You can learn more about these options in How are the different course access types different?.

3. Enable “Grant access on specific date”

After selecting the course and the access type, you will see a toggle called Grant access on specific date.

Turn this toggle ON.

A date picker will appear.

4. Choose the date and save

Select the exact day you want students to receive access.

Important notes:

• Access is granted at 12:00 AM (midnight) in the timezone of your account.
• If you are using drip content, the drip schedule will start counting from this specific date.
• This option works with Full access and Partial access (and their drip versions).

Once you have chosen the date, click Save to apply the changes.

What happens for the student?

When someone purchases the course (or is enrolled through the funnel), they will receive the usual confirmation and access email. However, they will only be able to open the course content starting from the date you selected.

Before that date, the course remains locked for them.

When should you use this feature?

• Official course launches on a fixed day
• Cohort-based programs (everyone starts together)
• Challenges or 30-day programs with a clear start date
• Seasonal or event-related courses
• When you want to build anticipation before opening the content

You can combine this scheduled access with all the usual enrollment methods available on systeme.io (see What are the different methods for giving access to a course?).

If you also want to give free access on a specific date, you can use an opt-in page combined with this setting, or manually enroll students after the date has arrived (see How to grant free access to a course and How to manually add students to a course).

Conclusion

Scheduling course access on a specific date is a powerful feature on systeme.io. It gives you full control over when your students can start learning, which is especially useful for launches, cohorts and time-based programs.

Set the date once in your order form resources, and every new student will automatically receive access only on the day you chose.

This simple setting can make your course launches much more professional and organized.

Related articles

• What are the different methods for giving access to a course?
• How are the different course access types different?
• How to sell an online course
• How to grant free access to a course
• How to manually add students to a course