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.
- Open Appointments and select Group By in the toolbar.
- Choose Team Members, Resources or both, or one of None, Services and Categories.
- Under Arrange Columns By, choose Alphabetical, Busiest First or Custom.
Arrange Columns By is worth setting once. Alphabetical is stable, Busiest First moves your busiest person to the left, and Custom is an order you set yourself with the arrows beside each name.
A greyed-out Team Members or Resources means nobody it would group by has working hours yet, so every column would show as closed. Selecting it opens Set working hours first, with a link to each one's hours.
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.
Choose what else sits on the columns
The switches under the Group By buttons add things to the columns without changing what a column is. Each one is remembered in this browser.
- Open Appointments and select Group By in the toolbar.
- To hide the column of bookings with nothing to group them by, switch off its switch, which follows the grouping, such as Show "No resource" column or Show "No service" column. With Team Members alone, it is the No team member row at the foot of the team list instead.
- With Team Members or Resources chosen, switch on Show session overlay to draw each session's hours at the top of its column.
- Switch Show tasks and Show rounds on or off.
Show tasks puts your business's own tasks, such as cleaning the cattery, at their time or in a Tasks row under the column heads. Show rounds puts each round and its forms on the calendar, and Hide done rounds keeps the finished ones off. Neither ever takes a slot. Both appear only when your business has rounds or the days on screen have tasks: Hide done rounds on the calendar walks through them.
Check
A grouped Day offers Fit or Scroll beside it in the view menu. Fit squeezes every column onto the screen, and Scroll keeps each column wide and lets you scroll across.
Read the load off the column heads
Once you group by resource, each column head with appointments carries their count in a green badge. It is never set against the room's limit, because pets at a time is how many at once, not a daily total.
The load goes on a line of its own, under the count, once you switch it on.
- Open Appointments and select Group By in the toolbar.
- Choose Resources, then switch on Show pets at a time, Show how full or Show hours booked.
Show how full does the work: a percentage badge that is green under half, amber from half, red from eighty per cent and slate at full or over. It measures the hours booked against the hours open times the pets at a time, which Show hours booked writes out. A team member column has no capacity of its own, so it just counts.
Check
Only Owner Admins and Admins see those three switches, and their line shows on a day, a timeline day and a week grouped by date. Show Total Capacity leaves the column heads alone: it turns each count in the resource list further down Group By into bookings over capacity, with the capacity 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.
- Open Appointments and select the view button in the toolbar, which reads Day or Week.
- Under How it looks, switch on Stack Mode.
- 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.
Stays and anything else that runs across days sit in a row above the day grid, and Show multi-day appointments under Show on the calendar hides or shows that row. Switched off, it hides those bookings in every view, Month included, and leaves them out of the counts at the top of the calendar, while blocked time and leave stay where they are. What each card prints is a third choice, separate from both of these: Choose what an appointment card shows.