Sharing rooms, chairs and equipment

Most booking software counts people. For a lot of businesses that is the wrong thing to count: there are four of you and three chairs, five therapists and two treatment rooms, six technicians and four stations. The fourth booking has nowhere to happen, whoever is free.

A resource is that scarce thing — a room, a chair, a station, a machine, a studio, a court. This page is about the part that is easy to get wrong: not how many there are, but who uses which one.

The two questions a resource answers

Every resource answers two separate questions, and they are set in two different places:

1. Which services need it? A haircut needs a chair; an online consultation needs nothing. Set on the resource's own page, or on each service.
2. Who can be booked into it? By default, anyone who performs its services. Set on the resource's page, under Who can be booked here.

Until you touch the second one, nothing changes: every resource is open to everyone who does its services, which is what a room with four identical treatment beds actually means.

"Which services need it" can be answered per service or per category. Every haircut needs a chair; no beard service does. Setting it on the category says so once and keeps saying it about services you add to that category next month. A service's real list is its own links plus its category's — a union, so saying it in both places is the same answer twice rather than a conflict, and the screens mark which services are inheriting it.

When every one of them is interchangeable

This is the common case and it needs no setup beyond creating the resources and linking them to services.

Four chairs, six barbers, all chairs the same. A customer picks a time; the booking is given whichever chair is free. Nobody chooses a chair and nobody needs to — the only thing the customer notices is that the 10:00 slot disappears once every chair is taken.

The same shape covers two identical treatment rooms in a clinic, three identical nail stations, four identical bays in a workshop.

When one of them belongs to somebody

Some equipment is not interchangeable, and pretending it is produces a calendar that lies. Three junior barbers share one chair while the master has his own. A physiotherapist keeps the plinth in the back room set up for her caseload and the two locums use the front one. A technician brings her own station.

Who can be booked here is the setting for that. Open the resource, choose Only these people, and name them. From then on:

• Nobody else is ever booked into it — including people you add to the team later, which is the case that otherwise bites six months after you set it up.
• The people you named can still use everything else that is open to them.
• Your own booking page stops offering the combination that cannot happen, rather than letting a customer pick it and finding out afterwards.

Naming nobody means anyone. There is no third state.

Who gets which one when several are free

When somebody could be booked into more than one resource, Bookodile gives them the one the fewest other people could have used.

That sounds like a detail and it is the difference between a full day and a half-empty one. If the master's own chair went to the first junior who happened to book, the master would find his chair taken by someone who had three other chairs to sit in. So: the person with a chair of their own is sent there first, and the shared ones stay free for whoever has nothing else.

A resource that holds several bookings at once is counted per place rather than per resource, so a room for four shared by four people is less contended than a chair shared by three.

You do not configure any of this. It follows from who each resource is kept for.

What it changes on your booking page

• A person nobody's resource is open to is not offered for a service that needs one. They stay bookable for everything that needs no resource.
• Times disappear when the right resource is busy, not when any resource is busy. If the master's chair is taken at 11:00, the master has no 11:00 — even though two shared chairs are standing empty, because he cannot sit in them.
• Customers never pick a resource. There is no "choose a room" step. They pick a time and a person; the booking is given a free resource behind it, and the screen before they confirm names the one it was given.

What it changes for your team

• The booking form offers each person only the resources open to them, and clears the resource if you change the person to somebody it is not kept for.
• Moving a visit onto a resource kept for somebody else warns you and lets you do it anyway, the same as moving one onto a resource that is already full. Your team is not bound by the setting the way a customer is.
• A combo is stricter. Each stage of a combo is pinned to one resource with nothing to fall back on, so a stage only offers the people its resource is open to. A stage nobody available can use means the combo offers no times at all — which is worth knowing before you build one.
• Each person's page has a "Where they work" card: which resources are kept for them, which they share, which belong to other people. It is read-only on purpose — the setting lives on the resource, and one setting with two places to change it is how two screens start disagreeing.
• Each service has a "Who can be booked, and where" card: one line per person who performs it, the resource each would be given, and how many bookings of that service can run at the same time.

Worked examples

A barbershop with a master's chair. Four chairs, six barbers. Chair 1 is kept for the senior barber; Chairs 2, 3 and 4 are open to everyone. Book all six at 10:00 and four bookings land: the senior in his own chair, three others in the shared ones. The remaining two are offered the next slot rather than the senior's chair.

A clinic where one room is not shared. Two treatment rooms. The back room is kept for the practitioner who keeps her equipment set up in it; the front room is open. A locum covering Fridays is offered the front room only, and when it is busy the locum has no times — which is true, and better found on the booking page than at the door.

A nail studio where one technician brings her own station. Four stations, one of them hers. She is booked there first, so the three shared stations stay free for the rest of the team. The studio still runs four appointments at once.

A gym with a rig only two coaches are signed off on. The rig is a resource kept for those two; the studio floor is open to everyone. Personal training that does not use the rig is unaffected, because that service is not linked to it.

A photo studio that also rents its room out. The room is open to both photographers, and the same room is a resource-only service customers hire with nobody attending. Both draw on the same room, so a hire at 14:00 takes 14:00 off both photographers as well.

Setting it up

1. Settings → Resources. Create the room, chair or machine if it does not exist yet. Its capacity is how many bookings it holds at the same time — 1 for anything private.
2. On the resource, tick which services need it — one service at a time, or Whole category for a group where every service needs it. Until at least one service does, a resource never affects a booking.
3. On the same page, under Who can be booked here, leave Anyone who does its services unless the thing belongs to somebody. If it does, choose Only these people and name them.
4. Open the service afterwards and read Who can be booked, and where. It shows what you just described, one line per person, and names anybody the service can no longer offer.

Every field on a resource: every setting on a resource.

What you pay

Bookodile bills per booking spot — how many appointments you can run at the same time — so declaring the scarce thing usually lowers your bill rather than raising it. Five barbers sharing one chair is one spot, not five.

Keeping a resource for named people does not change what you pay today. The meter counts people against resources without asking who is kept for whom. It is on the list to change, and the direction is downward: a chair only one person can sit in constrains a shop more than the count alone suggests, not less.

Full model: what Bookodile costs.

Limits

• There is no "usually mine, but shared when it is busy". A resource is open to anyone or kept for named people. If it should be available to everyone when it is free, leave it open — whoever has one of their own is sent there first anyway, so leaving it open costs the owner nothing in practice.
• A booking takes one resource, never two at once. A treatment that needs 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 the stages run one after another.
• Customers cannot request a specific resource, by name or otherwise.
• A person shut out of every resource a service needs disappears from that service. Their page says so; the service's page says so. Nothing tells the customer, because from the outside there is simply one fewer person to pick.
• Switching a resource off is not the same as archiving the service. A service whose every resource is inactive stays on the menu with no times to pick.
• Who a resource is kept for does not affect your bill yet.
• Your team can override a clash — a full resource, a visit moved onto somebody else's chair. A combo stage is the exception: it is pinned, so it only ever offers people its resource is open to.