Your calendar, and connecting Google Calendar

Your calendar, and connecting Google Calendar

The calendar shows a month at a time: every booking, the dates you are holding for a customer, and the days you have closed. Use the filter above it to narrow the month to one offering. Click anything on a day to open it.

How long a booking runs

An offering can say how long one booking takes, under Settings, then Bookings, then Catalog, then the offering, under "When does it happen". Say four hours, and a booking at nine in the morning leaves the afternoon open for another; say nothing, and a booking takes the whole day as it always has.

A stay answers the same question differently, because it is measured in nights. Tick that guests stay overnight and the offering asks instead when check-in is and when check-out is by. Stated, the room is taken until check-out on the day a guest leaves and free after it, so the next arrival can take that day; left empty, the whole check-out day is free.

Both are the offering's own figures, copied onto a booking when you take it. Change them later and bookings already taken keep what they were taken at; one booking can be corrected on its own from Edit booking details.

If you cannot say how long something takes, leave it empty. A calendar draws a length as though it were a fact, and an empty field says less than a wrong number.

What a booking asks for

Taking a booking and correcting one ask the same questions, and both are pages rather than boxes: Create booking from an inquiry, and Edit booking details from the booking's Details tab.

Every booking asks for the date and the arrival time, and which departure when the offering has them. A departure fills the arrival time in; change it when you told the customer something else, such as 10:30 for the 10:00 walk. The departure is still what is counted; the time is what they were told.

Two exceptions are checkboxes beneath them, already ticked when the booking carries one. Untick one to go back to the usual answer.

• Runs over more than one day. For the booking that is not done the day it starts. Offered only when the offering takes whole days: a 4-hour tour on three days is three bookings. A stay asks for its check-out outright instead, since it has to have one.
• Runs for a different length. For this booking alone, where the offering's own length is not right. The box shows that usual length beside it.

A booking runs over days or for a length, not both, so ticking one hides the other until you untick it.

The clock times are written on

Every time in Backoffice, on your agreements, and on the pages your customers open is written on one clock, chosen under Settings, then Workspace. The 24-hour clock is the default: "17:30" rather than "5:30 pm". Switch to the 12-hour clock there if that is how your business reads a time.

Nothing already agreed changes when you switch. A booking keeps the moment it was taken for, and only how that moment is written down changes.

Closing dates you cannot take

Block dates closes days. Give it a first and last day, a reason, and a note if the reason needs one, and choose whether it closes the whole business or one offering. Blocked days refuse new bookings and holds, and a customer checking those dates is told they are unavailable.

Blocking does not cancel the bookings already inside it. Those are agreements you have made, and closing the calendar is not the same as taking them back; the dialog tells you what the block now covers so you can sort them out yourself.

Holding dates before an agreement exists

Hold dates keeps days for an inquiry that looks likely, before any agreement exists. A hold has to expire, and it is given a week by default, so a customer who goes quiet gives the dates back on their own. Taking the booking from that inquiry uses the hold up. Anything else, including releasing it yourself, gives the dates back.

A hold on a single day can name the hours it keeps, under "Hours held". Keep a morning for one customer and the afternoon stays open for another. Leave them empty and the whole day is held. A hold across several days holds all of them, so the hours are not offered there.

Connecting Google Calendar

Go to Settings, then Bookings, then Google Calendar, and choose Connect Google Calendar. You will be asked to sign in to Google and to give permission. Only an Owner can connect, and the business needs a timezone set first, under Settings, then Workspace.

Connecting does two things at once.

Your bookings appear in Google. A calendar named Backoffice is created in the Google account you connected, and your bookings, holds, and blocked dates are written into it. A booking that says how long it runs, a stay with a check-out time, and a hold on part of a day are drawn where those hours are; anything that states no end is drawn across the day with its start time in the title, because a calendar cannot draw an end nobody has given.

The Backoffice calendar shows up in your Google Calendar sidebar beside the calendars you already have, in its own colour, and you can hide it or share it like any other.

Times you are busy in Google close your calendar here. Whatever your own Google calendar says you are busy with is drawn on your calendar here as Busy in Google Calendar and refuses bookings for those times.

Backoffice is the record

The events in the Backoffice calendar are copies. Change one in Google and the next sync puts it back; delete one and it comes back. Nothing you do in Google cancels a booking, moves a date, or releases a hold. Make those changes here, and Google follows.

Blocks read from Google work the other way round: you cannot edit them here, because they belong to the event in Google. Change the event there, and the block follows.

Marking a date busy in Google

Make an ordinary event on your own calendar in Google, not on the Backoffice one. Events on the Backoffice calendar, and on any other calendar in the account, are not read.

Two things catch people out:

• An all-day event is created as Free. Google marks a timed event as busy but an all-day event as free, and a free event closes nothing here. Open the event, change Free to Busy, and save.
• A busy time closes the whole business, whatever it is for. A personal appointment refuses bookings exactly as a work one does. Mark an event Free in Google if it should not close your calendar here.

Events you declined are ignored, and so is anything in the past.

When it syncs

The calendar refreshes itself as you use it, within a few minutes. If you have just blocked something in Google and want to see it now, press Sync Google on the calendar, or Sync now on the Google Calendar settings page.

If the connection stops working, the settings page says so and offers Reconnect. The usual cause is the permission being removed from the Google account.

Disconnecting

Disconnect stops both directions. The busy times read from Google are removed from your calendar here, and nothing more is written to Google.

The Backoffice calendar and everything already written into it stay in your Google account. They are yours, and your record of what your business did; delete them there if you would rather not keep them. Connecting again reuses the same calendar rather than making a second one.