Repeat bookings get some love and attention

By Andrew 10 Aug 2012 | Topic: General, Resource Scheduling 2

Imagine you want to book Resource X for 4 hours per day over 3 months. Resource Guru has always had this type of repeat booking. But when it came to editing repeat bookings, we knew we didn’t get it right the first time around. That’s why we looked long and hard at the functionality and made some huge improvements.

Before I talk about the improvements we’ve made, it’s worth just highlighting how repeat bookings work. You can make a repeat booking for either a specific time, eg 9am to 12pm every day for 2 weeks, or for a duration, eg 3 hours per day for 2 weeks like this.

This has always been the case in Resource Guru and one of the things that makes it so versatile. But, when it came to editing the bookings … well, let’s just say – it wasn’t great. But after some tender loving care and attention, repeat bookings have been healed and they now work the way you might expect.

Flexibility

Now when you edit a repeat booking, you are given the choice of only editing one day or the entire repeat. Like this …

The same goes for deleting. This adds some really important flexibility and convenience. Let’s say someone is taking an afternoon off in the middle of a 6 week booking and you just want to edit the hours on one day. All you do is choose to edit the individual day and Resource Guru will automatically separate that day from the rest of the repeat. Done!

Splitting

Let’s say you have a 6 week repeat booking for 4 hours per day. But you know that you need to increase the booking to 8 hours per day for the last couple of weeks because the project needs more effort than first anticipated. No problem, you can just split the booking into 2 blocks and increase the hours on the last block.

Endpoints and highlights

Most of the time it’s easy to identify where repeat bookings start and end. But sometimes they butt right up against each other and this can make it more difficult. So, we’ve added little endpoints to clearly mark where they start and end.

Also, when you roll over a repeat booking, you will see that all the bookings in the series are highlighted too – just a little touch that helps you get a clear picture of what’s going on. One last improvement is that you are now taken back to your original position on the calendar after making the booking.

More in the pipeline

Continuous enhancement is one of our mantras at Resource Guru. In the next phase, we plan to release more complex repeat bookings, eg if you have a regular meeting every Tuesday. We can’t make any promises on timings just yet but it’s firmly on our list.

Hi, I'm Andrew, one of the co-founders of Resource Guru. Please feel free to leave comments or get in touch - I'd love to hear from you.