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If you have any resource limitations on the services that you provide, you need to manage the resource availability with the appointments and personnel that are free. Resources management will ensure that you give your clients a better experience.
What limitations do your business resources place on your ability to schedule clients?
When you make appointments manually, you might keep a mental tally of the resources that you have free, and know whether you have a spot available. That kind of mental load can become exhausting and is not easy to share between staff members.
By using the related resources management tool, your system will decide whether you have the tools available to book an appointment. When you don’t have the tools free, the system won’t allow anyone to schedule an appointment. This automated resources management makes it far easier to share resource availability equitably between service providers.
Below are some examples of resources management that you might want to consider, based on the service industry in which you operate;
Education, Training & Tutoring Example
You have three classrooms available, and you have four different language teachers. If you get bookings for three of those language teachers, the fourth will become unavailable due to lack of resources, i.e. teaching rooms.
Beauty, Hair & Holistic Treatments Example
You have five different services that require the use of massage couches, and you only have three massage couches. You will allocate a massage couch as a necessary resource on all five of those services. However, if all three couches are in use, clients cannot book any other service that requires one.
Medical & Healthcare Example
You have a medical centre with four primary care doctors, a psychologist and a counsellor, but you only have three treatment rooms and two consultation offices.
Events & Entertainment Example
You have premises consisting of 15 meeting rooms of different sizes/capacities. However, only 8 can be provided “fully equipt” with projector, whiteboard, and other
Sports & Fitness Example
If you run CrossFit training at the same time as strength training, you want to ensure you have resources accessible. Your Crossfitters will be annoyed if they don’t have the medicine balls and kettlebells available and your weight lifters will be upset if all of the barbells are in use by the Crosfitters
Driving Schools
While the number of cars is an important aspect of a driving school, if you offer pre-driving simulations or hazard awareness programmes, you might need to restrict the number of appointments available by the number of simulator machines (probably one) or computers for hazard awareness.
Making the effort to list the resources that you have available makes your life easier. When your booking system knows what resources you have available, it streamlines another aspect of your booking management for you. No more mental load from remembering how many appointments are booked, easily shared between providers, and simply booked by your clients.
For more information on how to use the related resources feature with your SimplyBook.me booking solution, you can check out this article. Alternatively, you can get detailed instructions from our Help Centre
There is an alternative to the related resources feature if you don’t want to use available resources as a limiting factor. You can also use the limit bookings feature