Lesson 112

Team and operations

Categories, and staff versus station, across several service lines

A category is what the booking page, the calendar and the reporting all group by, so it is worth getting right once. What each line is constrained by is set per service, and they differ.

3 min read · Owner or manager · Growing
Open in Petboost

Running grooming, daycare and boarding out of one book is not three businesses in one app. It is one book with a category on every service, and the category is doing more work than it looks like it is.

The category is the grouping, everywhere

  1. Open Services, then Manage on the service and Manage Service.
  2. On Basic Info, choose the Service Category.
  3. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Service Type is the decision that cannot be undone, so take it first: Regular, Initial, Add-on (extras) and Stay each change what the rest of the form offers, and a boarding line built as a Regular service can never become a Stay. On a new service the type and the category sit together on the first step, where the category field is called Category.

Service Category is the one worth checking. A new service cannot be created without a Category, but on an existing service the field can be left empty. It groups the booking page, it is a Group By option on the calendar, and it is the split the reporting reads.

Tip

One category per line you would report on separately. Four categories you actually look at beats eleven that were named after individual services.

Each line is constrained by something different

The station question is answered per service rather than per business.

  1. Open Services, then Manage on the service and Manage Service.
  2. On Team & Resources, under How should resources work for this service?, choose Required, Optional or Not used.
  3. If you chose Required, pick the stations under Eligible Resources.
  4. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

A grooming line is usually constrained by the person, so How should team members work for this service? is set to Required and the resource question is not. A daycare day is constrained by the yard, so the resource is required. A stay is constrained by the pen. Read the blue line before you save, which is the product telling you what the booking engine will do.

Trap

Not used takes the station out of the calculation entirely, however carefully its hours and capacity are set. A daycare line that keeps overselling the yard is nearly always this, and nothing on the resource itself will show it.

Then read the day, and the month, by line

  1. Open Appointments and select Group By in the calendar toolbar.
  2. Choose Categories.

Group By set to Categories turns the day into one column per line, which is the view that tells a manager which line is behind this morning.

Check

The same split is waiting on Reporting & Intelligence, on the Services tab. Its category breakdown is the number a multi-line business actually runs on, because a good total can hide one line carrying the other two.