The purpose of this article is to help you understand: 

  • What is smart scheduling
  • How to set it up to your scheduling preferences

 

What is smart scheduling?

Smart scheduling controls how bookings are assigned to your service providers.  All of the BookingKoala subscription plans contain the same smart schedule settings. These settings allow you to partially or fully automate the scheduling process, freeing up time for other important aspects of your business.

Scheduling rules will vary from industry to industry, so we've built many different options to help customize the ways it will work for your business. 

 

Before Your Begin

Before you clear your test data and begin using the software to book appointments, we recommend setting up a few different parts of the system so you can 

First, we recommend going through and setting up your booking form(s).  This is the form you or customers will fill out in order to get automatic pricing, check availability, and book services.  There are 5 different types of booking forms. Each form represents a different style of providing estimates or pricing services. Click the links below to learn more about each type of form and how to set them up.

Next, you should set up your booking spots.  These are the days and times you offer customers to book your services.  Booking spots can be set up as fixed start times, like 8 AM, 9 AM, etc., or arrival ranges, like 8-10 AM, 10-12 PM, etc.  Visit the links below to learn how to set up booking spots for your business.  

Once these are finished, you can proceed with setting up your scheduling preferences.

 

How to Set Up Smart Scheduling for Your Business

As mentioned earlier, smart scheduling can be set up in a variety of ways. Use the following links to learn more about different ways to schedule services with your providers.  

  • Click here to learn more about the three types of scheduling.
  • Click here to set up your smart scheduling rules.  

If your teams or providers take on more than one booking per time slot, you can enable multiple appointments or "multi-spot" booking.  

  • Click here to enable multiple appointments per booking spot.
  • Click here to learn more about multi-spot scheduling, including how to set limits per provider or service type.

You can also review the following guides for additional information about how to set up your scheduling. 

  • Click here to learn more about same-day scheduling, including how to enable or disable it.  
  • Click here to learn how "N/A" scheduling works and how to use it when booking appointments.
  • Click here to learn how to enable the unassigned folder and waitlist features, including how to allow providers to see and pick up bookings from the waitlist.  
  • Click here to learn more about how staff and admin can use the unassigned folder feature.  
  • Click here to enable the multiple time zone feature, which helps staff and admin schedule appointments across multiple time zones.  

 

Testing Your Scheduling Rules

Once you have gone through each section and customized how your smart scheduling will work, you can begin testing these rules by creating new bookings.

If you have not cleared your test data yet, you can use the fake customer and fake provider accounts to schedule bookings from the staff/admin end, the provider end, and the customer end.  

When you are ready to begin setting up real providers and bookings, it is a good idea to flush your test data.  This will remove the fake customer, fake provider and team accounts, the job history for the fake customer and providers, all upcoming bookings for the fake customers and providers, and all fake charges.  

  • Click here to learn how to flush your test data.  

Once you have cleared your test data, you must add at least one location (if your store uses locations) and one service provider with availability to the system.  This will allow you and your customers to begin scheduling bookings.  

Here is more information about setting up (or disabling) locations for your form(s).

You can use the following guides to add your providers to the system and set up their schedules.

If you are having any issues, you can check out this article to help diagnose which problem you are having with your scheduler and how to fix it.  You are also welcome to email us at support@bookingkoala.com and we can take a closer look at your store to help sort out any scheduling or availability issues.