How can you have appointments at the same time with different services?

[LeggoSports]

     I run a business that is related to soccer. In my business (indoor soccer facility) I have 3 fields customers can't rent. Field 1, 2, and 3. They can rent them for a certain amount of time, with price varying depending on the amount of time they want (for example, $30.00 for 30 minutes, $60.00 for an hour, etc.). Each field is labeled under "Service". However, when we try to use Square Appointments, we will, for example, book an appointment for Field 1 at 6:00 pm for 30 minutes. Then we try to book Field 2 (which is a different service) at 6:00 pm, but the option doesn't show up. 

     Is there a way to make services have a different calendar, booking time, or separate functions so that when one customer wants to rent Field 1 at 6:00, another can rent Field 2 at 6:00 as well?

@Kelly @Tom @Helen @Joe_123 @JustinC 

[nika · Accepted solution]

Hi @LeggoSports! Thanks for joining the Seller Community! 🙂

Setting up your reservations in the way you're asking for is currently a feature request called "resource booking". But there's a workaround!

Instead of booking soccer fields like in your scenario, reservations (appointments) can be booked with staff members. To make this work, you'd need to set up each soccer field as a "staff member" and pay for appointments for teams.

One thing to note is that since this is a workaround, our system will refer to the soccer fields as staff members on the customer facing booking site as well as their notifications. Unfortunately there's not a way to get around that.

Please let me know if you have questions about this workaround. I know it's not ideal, but hopefully it can work for you!

[LeggoSports]

     This worked great. I set it up, and it seems to be working great. I just have 2 problems/questions.

     -Is there a way to hide "Services" from the menu, since customers will now be booking under "Staff Members". 

     -When customers book fields, is there a way to have an option where clients can choose between having to pay half online, then pay the rest when they get to the location, and pay in full online? If there isn't a way to do both, can it be done with the first option?

[pmdworks]

Hi Nika_S,

Thank you for your great and timely answer during the pandemic.  I have a similar issue and hope that you can comment if I'm on the right track based on your previous answer.

Our church holds an annual food festival in SF every year in September.  We won't be able to have the normal setup so we plan to do curbside pickup of food pre-purchased on our Square Online website and would like to limit the number of patrons who come to pickup at any one time for health and safety reasons.  Based on your reply to LeggoSports I think we would:

Use Square Appointments on our Square website to have our patrons order and pay for their food products ahead of time and schedule a time for pickup (over a two day period on a weekend in September), and use Square Appointments for Teams where we would create maybe 30 Team Members (Pickup 1, Pickup 2, etc.) so that patrons could come in time increments of maybe 30 pickups every 30 min's where each patron would select one of the available team members at any one time, if the max team members is reached for any time slot then the patron would need to pick another time slot, does that make sense and sound reasonable for a user to be able to do (especially if we provide some pre instructions on the website)?  

Also, since these are generic team members used for scheduling purposes, would we really need to sign up for the paid teams service since they would all have the same permissions?  As a non-profit church every penny counts, thanks!  Phil

[nika]

Hello @pmdworks! Thanks for posting.

To be completely honest, this scenario might get a bit tricky. If you want to implement Appointments on the home page of your Online Store to have customers book a pick up time, you'll want to have some sort of message pointing them to go through the second step of booking a pick up time. If they happen to miss that memo or forget, I fear that your pick up idea might get messy!

When you're setting up your pickup, you can space out your pickup orders. The option will look like this:

I think this thread might help you out, as well. Please let me know if you have other questions!

[pmdworks]

Hi Nika_S, many thanks for your reply.  I tried to use the built in pickup feature but there is no way to select specific days in the future to schedule pickups, otherwise it would be perfect for us.  Also, if someone does not manually pick the correct dates in the future it's almost impossible to fix, which is why we're going the Appointments calendar route.  If people forget to schedule on their own (I've got so many reminders including a pop-up window...) at least we can see that in the system and correct for it!

[nika]

@pmdworks Hopefully it all works out for you! You'll have to report back and let us know.

[pmdworks]

Ok sure thing will try to remember to post update here when done with the setup...