Essential Settings
By now you have successfully created your shop, and can begin setting up the application to handle online appointment booking, messaging, and many other features. This page details the first settings and options that you should visit to get your shop off on the right foot.
Settings
Navigate to your shop’s settings from the dashboard by clicking the link labelled “Settings” in the sidebar.
Shop hours and availability
Set your shop’s default business and hours and availability.
https://app.velodrop.com/admin/settings/availability
Shop hours
To manage appointment booking, the application will need to know what days your shop is open, along with the hours of operation. Appointments can not be booked on days where your shop is closed. These hours serve as default, and you can adjust the hours for holidays, and other specific days on an individual basis at any time.
Limit bookings
To prevent any appointments from being booked until you are ready, bookings are disabled by default. To enable booking, set a default limit of bookings available for each day of the week that you are open. These serve as default values that can be later overridden for any specific day.
The default behaviour of the application is to limit the number of appointments per day. You can later change these settings to something that matches your workflow and preferred way of managing appointments.
Create and edit employees
When you registered, an account was created with the role “owner“. This the account to which your shop and it’s employees all belong, and is the only account which may edit some important shop settings.
An employee was also created with the role “technician“. Technicians represent employees who’s time is devoted to fulfilling service appointments.
Employees that you create will have the ability to safely login with limited access and fulfil common shop tasks.
You should create an employee for each technician in your shop, along with their default work hours.
If you, the account owner, are not going to fulfilling appointments yourself, you should then set your employee role to “other“.
https://app.velodrop.com/admin/settings/employees
Creating services and packages
Though not technically required, you’ll most likely want to have customers select from a list of available services when booking an appointment. This will allow you to enable other features, such as automated work-load based time management,or providing quotes to customers when during booking.
Services
Creating a new service is easy. Just give your service a name, description, cost and a value for the amount of time expected to complete.
You can then select whether you need the form to appear on the publicly accessible online booking page, or only on the private admin booking form.
Once the service has been completed, you can edit it’s settings by clicking on it from the list. You can even change what days this service is available on.
Packages
Packages are a collection of services, so you will need to have already created some services before you can create a package. Creating a new package is just like creating a service, with the added step of selecting existing services to include with in it. This provides a great visual indicator of what level of service is being offered when a user selects a package in the booking form.
Custom Branding
You may customise and brand your shop’s public booking page by changing the theme, uploading your company logo, and by uploading a custom background image.
At present there is a choice between a dark and a light theme. More themes and customisation options are coming soon!
Booking Widget
If you have a web developer handy, we also have a simple widget you can embed in your website that will allow customers to book their appointment without leaving your website.