Options
From the Settings page, click on the button “Options” to access advanced settings controlling the management of appointment booking.
In this article
Available Options:
Appointment Booking Start Date
This setting allows you to disable appointments from being booked until a specific date in the future.
Assign Technicians To Appointments
If you would like to be able to assign specific appointments to specific employees, set this option to "Yes".
Require Customers To Book An Existing Service Or Package
By default, if a customer can't find a relevant service or package listed in your booking form, they can still book an appointment by adding some text in the "Other Information" field on the form. If you would like to force the customer to choose at least one preset service or package to create an appointment, set this option to "Yes".
Require Customer Address When Booking An Appointment
By default, customers are not required to provide an address when booking an appointment. If you require that your customers provide their address when making an appointment, set this option to "Yes". This will add required address fields to all booking forms.
Calculate Availability By Employee Work Hours
Selecting “Yes” for this setting will allow Velodrop to manage appointment availability according to the amount of technician employee work hours available for each date. By default, Velodrop limits appointment availability only according to the appointment limit set in "Shop Hours and Availability" settings.
The percentage input allows you to approximate the percentage of the work day devoted by your shops’s technicians to actually working on bikes. By default this settings is 80%, so for example, for each technician working an 8 hour day, your shop can allocate 6.4 hours, or 384 minutes, of work.
To make this feature work as expected, you’ll need to pay attention to the following key areas of your shop’s settings:
- Employee schedules and hours need to be accurate and up to date.
- The “Time” values in each Service and Package needs to be set to an appropriate value.
It may take a little time through trial and error to find the values that work best for your shop.
When Appointments Are Completed Ahead Of Schedule
This setting tells Velodrop what to do when previously booked appointment space has been cleared, such as when appointments are completed ahead of schedule, or when future appointments are cancelled. By default, the application is set to do nothing. Freed space is simply made available for booking again.
If you prefer to organise your shop on a first-come-first-serve basis, then you may set this option to fill the freed appointment space by moving any appointments for which bikes have already been received forward in the queue. When this option enabled, customers with bikes already waiting in the shop will be prioritised over appointments booked after theirs.
There are two ways to implement this feature:
- Automatically shuffle appointments Forward in the queue
- Selecting the option to automatically shuffle appointments that have already been received forward in the queue will perform the task of migrating the appointments in the background whenever space is freed by completing or cancelling future appointment.
- Alert you that availability has been created
- Selecting this option will alert you whenever availability has been created, but it will need to manually choose to shuffle the appointments forward to fill the space. This may be a safer option if you are not sure this feature suites your shop’s work flow, but would like to test it.
When Appointments That Are Currently On Hold Fall Behind The Current Date
This setting tells Velodrop what to do when appointments that have been placed on hold have fallen behind in the schedule, and helps prevent them from getting lost or retreating out of sight when held for long periods of time.
There are three ways to implement this feature:
- Automatically move them to the next available booking date
- Selecting this option will automatically move any held appointments still scheduled in the past forward to the next available date in the queue, keeping your work load predictable and ensuring held appointments have a spot reserved in the queue at all times.
- Automatically move them up to today's schedule
- Selecting this option will automatically move any held appointments still scheduled in the past forward up to the present day's queue, keeping all the appointments that are placed on hold highly visible in your schedule for easy follow-up.
- Alert you that there are trailing appointments on hold and allow you to decide what to do about it
- Selecting this option will notify you when held appointments have fallen behind the schedule, but will not automatically move anything, providing you with the option to perform either of the 2 steps listed above, or do nothing at all.
Show service categories
Velodrop allows you to group and order your services into customizable categories. This option let's you choose where these catagories are used throughout the app.