# Every setting on a resource > Rooms, chairs, stations and equipment as bookable things — capacity, their own working hours, resource-only services, and why declaring a scarce resource usually lowers your bill rather than raising it. _Last verified: 2026-09-10. Source: https://bookodile.com/docs/reference-resources_ A resource is anything scarce that a booking consumes besides a person: a treatment room, a chair, a station, a machine, a studio, a court. Bookodile treats it as a real constraint — if the thing is busy, the time is not offered, however many staff are free. Resources live at **Settings → Resources**. There are six settings on one. ## What a resource is for Most booking software counts people. That is wrong for most of the businesses that use it, because the bottleneck is usually not the headcount: - A barbershop with four barbers and three chairs can run three appointments. - A spa with five therapists and two treatment rooms can run two. - A nail studio with six technicians and four stations can run four. Without resources, all three shops would offer times they cannot honour, and the customer finds out on arrival. With them, the calendar tells the truth. ## Capacity **Capacity** (`capacity`) is the number of bookings this resource can hold at the same time. The default is 1, which is right for anything private — a room, a chair, a single machine. Capacity above 1 works properly and is enforced when the booking is made, not just displayed. A studio floor with capacity 8 takes eight bookings in the same slot and refuses the ninth. **That is also how a class that fills up works.** A recurring class is a service attached to a capacity resource: the eighth person books, the slot disappears, and if someone cancels, the waiting list offers the freed place automatically. Events are the other shape, and are better for genuinely one-off things. Two honest notes on how the count works: - A booking is counted against capacity for its whole window, including the service's buffer. Two bookings that merely touch the window you asked for each use a unit, even if they do not overlap each other. The effect is conservative: it never over-books, and it can occasionally offer less than a perfect packing would. - Your own team can override a resource conflict when booking from the calendar. That is deliberate — staff know when the extra chair is coming out of the back room — but it means the limit binds customers, not you. ## Working hours A resource can carry **its own working hours** (`working_hours`), up to four ranges a day. Left empty, it simply follows the business. Resource hours **narrow** and never widen. A room available 24 hours inside a shop open 09:00 to 17:00 is bookable 09:00 to 17:00. A room available only 18:00 to 21:00 inside the same shop is bookable never, and the day comes back empty. This is the mechanism behind "only on certain days". A service cannot itself be restricted to particular times, so if you want to offer something only on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, attach it to a resource whose hours are exactly those windows. Resource hours are enforced for every part of a booking — the main service, every stage of a combo, and every add-on. ## Name, description and colour **Name** (`name`) is what your team sees on the calendar and in the resource filter. Customers never see a resource name; they only see times appearing or not appearing. **Description** (`description`) is a note for your own team. **Colour** (`color`) tints the resource on calendar views that group by resource. ## Turning one off **Active** (`is_active`) takes a resource out of service without deleting it — the room being redecorated, the machine away for repair. An inactive resource takes no new bookings from the booking page and is no longer offered in the calendar's resource picker. Bookings already on it are kept. **A service is offered only while at least one of the resources it can use is active.** If a service can use any of three rooms and you switch one off, it keeps running on the other two. Switch off the last one and the service offers no times at all, on every day, until a room is active again. A service linked to no resource is unaffected. **A combo is stricter.** Each stage of a combo that uses a resource is set to one resource, not a choice between several, so there is nothing to fall back on: switch off the resource that any one stage uses and the whole combo offers no times until it is active again. That is the difference between switching off a resource and archiving a service: archiving removes the service from the menu, while switching off its only resource leaves it on the menu with no times to pick. For a room that is out for a week, the switch is enough; for one that is gone for good, archive the services too, so customers stop seeing something they cannot book. Your own team is not bound by the switch. From the calendar a booking can still be created for that service with no resource attached — the same override that lets staff book past a full resource. ## Linking a resource to a service Two ways, and a service uses the union of both: - **Directly**, on the service's own Resources card. - **Through its category**, set once on the category, inherited by every service in it. The service screen shows these as read-only chips. Linking several resources to a service means **any one of them**, not all of them together. A booking holds exactly one resource: for each time, the booking page tries the service's resources — its own before its category's — and gives the booking the first one that is free then: not full, inside its own hours, and not blocked out in the calendar. A haircut linked to three chairs is offered while any chair is free; a massage linked to two treatment rooms goes into whichever room is empty. So one booking cannot hold two resources at the same time. A treatment that needs both a room and a particular machine cannot be set up to wait for both. A combo can use a different resource at each stage, but its stages run one after another, not together. **No employee needed.** A service can be set to skip the person entirely, so availability comes from the resource alone. That is how a room, a court or a studio is rented with nobody attending. See [every setting on a service](/docs/reference-services). ## Resources and what you pay This is the part worth understanding before you decide how to model your shop, because it usually works in your favour. Bookodile bills per **booking spot** — the number of appointments you can run at the same time — not per person. A pool of people constrained by a resource counts as the smaller of the two. So five barbers sharing one chair is **one** spot, not five. Four therapists with two treatment rooms is **two**. Declaring the scarce thing is what tells the meter your real capacity, and it lowers the bill. The mistake that costs money is the opposite one: leaving a scarce resource undeclared. A shop with five staff and no resources is a shop claiming five simultaneous bookings, and it is billed for five. Declaring an abundant resource costs nothing. Full model: [What Bookodile costs](/docs/what-bookodile-costs). ## Worked examples **A barbershop, four barbers, three chairs.** Three resources of capacity 1, linked to every haircut service. Four barbers can be rostered; three appointments can run. The bill is three spots. **A spa, five therapists, two treatment rooms and one sauna.** Two capacity-1 rooms linked to the massage and facial services, and a capacity-4 sauna linked to the sauna session. Massages cap at two concurrent, the sauna takes four, and the sauna is a resource-only service with no therapist attached. **A gym running classes.** The studio floor is one resource with capacity 12, and the class is a service linked to it. Twelve people book the 18:00 slot and it closes; a cancellation is offered to whoever is on the waiting list. The gym's personal-training services are linked to nothing, because the trainer is the constraint. **A nail studio, six technicians, four stations.** Four capacity-1 stations. The fifth simultaneous booking is refused even with two technicians idle, which is correct — there is nowhere to sit. The bill is four spots rather than six. ## Limits - **Customers never choose a resource.** There is no "choose a room" step: they pick a time, and the booking is given a free resource behind it. The review screen before they confirm names the one it was given. - **A booking takes one resource, never two at once.** A service linked to several resources uses whichever one is free; there is no way to require a room and a machine together. - **Switching off a service's only resource leaves the service on the menu** with no times to pick — and for a combo, so does switching off the resource any one stage uses. Archive the service if it should disappear. - **A resource cannot be booked directly.** It is always reached through a service, including a service with no employee. - **Nothing in the database enforces capacity.** It is checked when the booking is made, and two requests arriving in the same instant can in principle both pass. The check is repeated immediately before writing, which narrows the window without closing it entirely. - **Your team can override a resource conflict** from the calendar; customers cannot. - **Resource hours narrow, never widen** — a resource cannot make a shop open outside its own hours.