Appointment Preferences
From the Settings page, click on the button “Appointment Preferences” to access advanced settings controlling the management of appointment booking.
Set appointment booking start date
This setting allows you to disable appointments from being booked until a specific date in the future.
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.
- When this option is selected, more fields will appear giving you the option to continue limiting appointments by number-per-day also, or use only the employee work hours calculation.
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 take 6.4 hours, or 384 minutes.
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.
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.