How to configure day planning/Day templates

Day templates

Calendar view

Day templates are visualizations to make sure your schedule stays readable, and you have an excellent overview of the month and year.
As you can see, the use of colors is useful to distinguish specific periods (school holidays, yearly closing,…) and special days ((inter)national holidays, recurring events,…) with the same characteristics.
There are no limits on the number of templates you can make. However, we do encourage reusing them as much as possible since the space to visualize them is limited. Making a planning template for single occurrences is not considered as a best practice.

How to create a day template

1. navigate to the Planning templates view.
   1. Menu
   2. Planning
   3. Templates
2. create a new entry.
3. Fill in the required information.
4. Save the template.
   

Creating a day schedule

Of course, only linking the day to a colored naming isn’t sufficient. We still need to define what will happen this day and when the resource is available. To do this, we need to navigate to the resources section of the software. (Menu -> Activities -> Resources) Once there, you select the resource you want to create the schedule for by double-clicking on it. You’ll see some general information which is addressed in other articles and not relevant to the current one. The important field, for now, is the following:

• “Reservation kind” relates to the way you want to open the resources for reservations.
  • “Disabled” will, well, disable any form of reservations on this resource.
  • “Overbooking” means you can keep adding reservations even if the maximum allowed spots are already filled. This can be useful for situations where you can easily add a couple places or where the area can be extended, allowing more people. (playfields, arcades, conference rooms…)
  • “Strict” will only allow the maximum amount of people that are allowed in the schedule. If you are trying to book a bigger group, a message will appear blocking you from doing it.
• “Schedule kind.”
  • “Agenda” will visualize the reservation overview as a regular agenda with 15′ slots, which are not adjustable. (Party rooms, event spaces…)
  • “None” will create any schedule for this resource. (bar, shops…)
  •  “Schedule setup” is the one needed most often as it allows you to create a schedule from scratch.

For the sake of the manual, we will use Overbooking and Scheduled Setup.

Once all the information is filled in, you can navigate to the Schedules tab of the resource and create a new schedule.

The first thing to do is fill in a name. We handle the best usage policy of giving a meaningful name, for example, “Monday”, “weekdays”, “School Holidays” all of these examples tell you immediately which period the schedule is meant for and can be reused for multiple days if needed.
The sequence can be any number (even negative). when starting a new day the system will load the schedules for the resource and show the first applicable schedule starting from the one with the lowest sequence number. We advise you to keep some margin between the numbers and work in steps of 5. Like this, if you ever have to reorganize the sequence you allow yourself to put a schedule in between 2 others without having to change all the following schedules.

Next are the schedule lines. If a schedule is a day in the calendar, a schedule line is a part of the day. Morning, noon, evening are all valid schedule lines if you want them to differ from the rest it is possible. But mainly you want to use this for when your venue has his peak hours or dedicated activities. (Saturday evenings, happy hours,…)

As you can see in the example I’ve created 3 schedule lines so I can differentiate the schedule for the peak hours, with the goal of increasing my revenue. The session/timing tab will help me determine how one entry of this resource should look like. In other words, how does one session/heat looks like? There are some specific fields if you selected the race resource but we will not handle them here.

The session needs the following information.

• Duration: How long is the playtime of this activity?
• Duration Interval: how much is the total assigned time for the session including the cleaning and/or setup?
• Maximum drivers: how many people are allowed simultaneously?
• Kiosk capacity: How many seats are available on the smart kiosk devices? (-1 is maximum drivers)
• Online capacity: How many seats are available online?
• Scores: which score group is used?
• Games:
• Enable E-mail sending
• Enable SMS sending
• Rules:

Here is what I created as a holiday schedule for a shooting activity. (Lasertag, Archery tag, Rival war,…)

During the day I want to have 9 minutes sessions with 3 minutes prep time allowing 10 participants per session and as well the kiosks as the online booking can use every available slot. This is because I anticipate the day time to be a bit less crowded. So giving some extra time to prep allows me to save an additional employee.

During the peak period of my day, I have extra workers so I increase the allowed participants to 12 while I decrease the prep time to a minute.
I also limited the number of online slots available, like this people have to come over to your venue and spend time and money while they wait for their turn. This is a revenue booster that you can apply for all your high profile attractions.

The last hour of my day I want to make sure the activity closes in time and everything is ready for the next day. Since I still have the extra workers I can increase the duration interval and run one heat less to make sure that the guest still has the quality experience while a small group starts cleaning and preparing the activity.
Also notice that I disabled any online bookings and kiosk slots to prevent people from booking the last slot when the attraction is closed early.

This is it, your schedule is made and ready to be linked to the day template.

Link your schedule to the day template.

Now that we have a day planned in our schedule you can link it to one or more day templates. Just go to the “periods of time” tab in your schedule and select the required templates.

Finally you can select all the dates you want to apply the schedule to.

Use a day Template

Now that we’ve made a template, we would love to use the template and deploy it over different days in our scheduler. As you can see, your newly created templates are added to the toolbar on top of the screen.

1. You can select the single day(s) and click the desired template by holding CTRL.
2. You can assign a range of dates by clicking and dragging the mouse in all directions.

Once every thing is configured and the days are assigned you will get a nice overview of all the different operational hours of a day or period.