Lesson 27

Bookings and the calendar

Calendar views and the shape of your day

Group By decides what the columns are, Stack Mode decides whether there is a clock at all. Most "my calendar looks wrong" is one of those two.

2 min read · Owner or manager · Running day to day
Open in Petboost

The calendar has two independent controls and people reach for the wrong one. Group By decides what a column is: a person, a room, a service. The view button, which names the view you are on, decides how a column is drawn: against a clock, or as a stack.

Change one and the day can look unrecognisable without a single booking moving. That is usually what has happened.

Decide what a column is

Team Members and Resources are the two that combine. Pick both and you get a column per groomer and a column per bath, side by side. None, Services and Categories replace whatever was selected.

  1. Open Appointments and select Group By in the toolbar.
  2. Choose Team Members, Resources or both, or one of None, Services and Categories.
  3. Under Arrange Columns By, choose Alphabetical, Most Appts or Custom.

Arrange Columns By is worth setting once. Alphabetical is stable, Most Appts moves your busiest person to the left, and Custom is a drag order you set yourself.

Tip

Grouping is remembered by the browser you set it in, not by the business. Your calendar looking different from the front desk's computer is not a bug.

Read the load off the column heads

Once you group by resource, each column head carries a count. Turn Show Total Capacity on and it becomes a count against that room's limit, with the colour doing the work.

  1. Open Appointments and select Group By in the toolbar.
  2. Choose Resources, then switch on Show Total Capacity.

Green is under half, amber is half, red is eighty per cent, and solid slate is full or over. A team member column has no capacity of its own, so it just counts.

Check

On a week or month view the denominator is multiplied out across the days shown. A room of eight reads as 8 on a day and 40 across a working week.

Turn the clock off when the day is stacked

A grooming day with six dogs starting at 9am is unreadable against a time grid. Stack Mode drops the clock and lists them instead.

  1. Open Appointments and select the view button in the toolbar, which reads Day or Week.
  2. Under Advanced View Options, switch on Stack Mode.
  3. Under Sort Stack By, choose Appointment Status.

Sort Stack By only appears once Stack Mode is on, and Appointment Status is the one to know: it orders the pile by how far each booking has got, with In Progress at the top and the bookings still to be checked in, Confirmed and Pending, straight after.

Tip

Stack Mode has a keyboard shortcut, S, shown beside the switch. It is the fastest way to flip a day back when it suddenly looks wrong.