Booking rules in Calpendo are an often overlooked part of what the system can do for you. Once setup they are designed to work seamlessly without really letting anyone know that ‘Hey I’m a Booking Rule and I just did this thing for you!’.
This means that new customers coming to Calpendo, or even current customers who have had systems for a while may not know about the potential of Booking Rules.
I’m therefore going to start a series on Booking Rules in Calpendo looking at some of the ways in which individual rules can benefit you as a facility.
In general booking rules are used just as it says, to apply rules on how bookings are made within Calpendo. In our previous blog post I looked at the concept of Time Templates and how they are used to control when and what users can do on their system. Templates are generally the first step for applying some control as they are very good with time. Booking rules takes this a step further by providing more fine grained control often in specific scenarios where Templates may be lacking.
If you are not a current Calpendo customer I hope you can use these upcoming blogs as a way to think about how you could handle the booking environment for your facility and how it can be improved. For current customers I would say start thinking about the sort of things you might want to be able to do with your Calpendo using Booking Rules.
The list which we will cover, as well as a brief description of each, is as follows (which will be updated with links as blog posts are written. I might not write these in the list order!):
- Double Booking Rule – prevent more than one booking on a resource at one
- Duration Rule – control the length of bookings
- Holiday Rule – prevent bookings on specific dates
- Interval Rule – enforce gaps between bookings
- Number of Bookings Rule – control the number of bookings allowed during a period of time
- Predefined Slots Rule – force bookings to follow predefined time slots during the day
- Search Results Rule – allow a booking to proceed if data in it matches a record held elsewhere
- Simple Rule – a flexible rule used to apply your own custom conditions
- Total Time Booked Rule – control how much time users are allowed to book for during a period