Our software engineers hit the ground running in 2023, and managed to release a product update less than 3 weeks into the new year. Outstanding, I hear you say!

This product update has been focused on our Bookings app, in particular the calendar has had a big upgrade.

We have added the ability to view bookings in a list as well as traditional grid. What we are particularly excited about is you can now group your bookings by venue, customer and agenda. Further more, to make it easier to customise your calendar view, you can filter bookings by all the related fields and colour the booking by its  status, venue or customer. All these changes will make it much easier to quickly find availability , particularly if you have lots of venues and meeting spaces. The calendar has now been transformed into a tool in which you can get work done.

Special thanks to the following people for giving valuable feedback to improve bookings.

• Julie Gillies, Stilton Parish Council
• Brigitte Taylor, Marks Tey Parish Council
• Alison Johnston, St Ives
• Justine Hopkins,  Berkeley Town Council
• Louisa Stannett, Horsford Village Hall

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Quickly navigating all bookings to find availability 

We have made it much easier to browse and view all your bookings in the past, present and future, with different levels of detail and styling options. This makes it much more efficient to find venue availability for a customer.

The basic navigation controls include:

• Duration selection- Ability to view your bookings grouped by a day, week or month 
• Date selection - Ability to navigate (“paginate”) between past and future date ranges, for the given duration using the arrow buttons.
• Date picker - ability to easily jump ahead and pick a date far in the future
• Colour selection - ability to colour bookings by booking status, payment status, venue and customer.
• Freeze column - the top row is frozen so it makes it easier to easily see which date or venue your booking refers too.  Very useful if you have lots of bookings and need to scroll the page!

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List view and group by Agenda, Venue or Customer

We are all familiar with viewing calendars as a Grid, we are also now supporting list view. 

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Whilst it does not seem useful, it enables us to provide other useful features, in particularly the ability to group by “venue” and “customer”, as well as the traditional “agenda” view.

This views can be changed in the new view mode switcher dropdown, which gives you

• Grid by Agenda - the traditional view, with agenda at the top
• Grid by Venue - you can now compare venues alongside each other for the same date range.  Good for find alternative venues for customer if the one they want is already booked.
• List by Agenda - view bookings as a chronological list (like a diary), or can be useful for see how the week should be planned.
• List by Venue - this is my favourite view, with the venues appearing down the left hand side and agenda across the top.  
• List by Customer - Same as above, except customers appear on the left and side.  Only customer who have bookings

Again with all views you can select the duration day, week, month (1,3,5 day views Grid by Venue). We hope you like it.

Advanced filtering

Last year we added the ability to filter your record lists by tons of filter options.  We have now added the same filter system for the calendar data.  The example I showed above with the grouping by venue was achieved by the filter, where I only filter the view by Football pitches. 

Other minor improvements

• Bookings - Minimum Time in Advance - ability to set the minimum time in advance a booking can be made. Giving you time to plan your resources.
• Bookings - Archiving bookings - ability to archive completed bookings, will still be possible to view archived bookings via filter menu.
• Email correspondence - Set from name of sender to local council name