Lesson 103

Team and operations

Rooms, kennels and pens as resources

A pen is a resource with its own capacity, and the booking engine ignores it until the stay service says it needs one. That one setting is why a suite for four takes a fifth dog.

3 min read · Owner · Getting set up

Every pen, run, suite and cattery room you have is a resource: a thing with its own hours and its own capacity, separate from the people who work there. Modelling them is the easy half. The half that goes wrong is linking them to the service, because until you do, none of them is in the calculation at all.

How many dogs sleep in it

Capacity on a resource is how many pets can be in it at once, which for boarding is how many sleep in it.

  1. Open Resources and select Manage on the pen.
  2. On Capacity, set Pets at a Time to how many pets sleep in it.
  3. For dogs from one household sharing, switch on Allow more siblings side-by-side and set the Same-family limit.
  4. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Allow more siblings side-by-side is the boarding rule you actually want. Two dogs from one household will share a suite where two dogs from different owners could not, and the same-family limit is how you say so without raising the pen's capacity for everybody.

Tip

Set the number to what the room holds, not to what you would like to sell. The grid above is the thing to check it against, because the purple squares are the ones only a sibling can take.

Say the stay needs one

  1. Open Services, then Manage on the stay service and Manage Service.
  2. On Team & Resources, under How should resources work for this service?, choose Required.
  3. Pick the pens under Eligible Resources.
  4. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Required is the setting a boarding service wants. The engine then refuses a check-in date when no eligible pen is free, and the blue line spells out what it will do before you save.

ModeWhat the engine does
RequiredRefuses the dates when no eligible pen is free
OptionalStaff can attach a pen; the engine never refuses for want of one
Not usedThe pen is out of the calculation entirely
Trap

A suite built for four that keeps taking a fifth dog is almost always a service left on Optional. The pen is configured, the number is right, and nothing is reading it.

Read the night off the column heads

Group the calendar by resource and each pen becomes a column with its own count.

  1. Open Appointments and select Group By in the calendar toolbar.
  2. Choose Resources.
  3. Switch on Show Total Capacity.

The colour is the threshold rather than the number: under half is green, half is amber, eighty per cent is red, and full is solid slate. Family room above is full, which is the answer to "can we take a third from the Mitchells" without opening anything.

Check

The denominator only appears once Show Total Capacity is on, and only on a resource column. A team member column has no capacity of its own, so it counts bookings and stops there.