Configure the booking process

Should users be allowed to make repeat bookings or not? Do bookings require payment or approval? Should new bookings be confirmed? To whom? And what about reminders and follow-up emails? The SuperSaaS system offers you fine-grained control over each of these aspects of the booking process by letting you:

Enable Repeated Bookings
Decide whether payment and approval is needed for an appointment
Connect to a video conferencing service for online appointments
Configure confirmations and reminders for both email and/or SMS
Design the process upon completion of a booking

Repeated bookings

By default, users can create only one booking at a time. However, both Resource and Capacity schedules can be configured to allow repeating bookings, so that users do not have to create each booking separately.

Resource Schedule

Navigate to Configure > Process
Select Add a “Repeat” option to the dialog box for new reservations
Press Save changes

When booking, users will now have the option to repeat their booking daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly by date or monthly by day, all until a specific end date.

Capacity schedule

When setting up a new time slot on a schedule, the administrator (or superuser) can make it repeat daily, weekly, every two weeks, or every month (by date or by day) until a set date. Only when a slot itself repeats and the schedule is configured accordingly, can users make recurring bookings.

Repeating bookings come in handy when for example, you want to set up something like weekly classes. You can create recurring classes to repeat weekly. For recurring monthly bookings you have the option let them repeat by a specific date (like the 15th of each month) or on a specific day (the second Monday of each month).

To allow users of a capacity schedule to make repeat bookings, follow these steps:

Navigate to Configure > Process
Depending on whether users should be able to pick their own repeat frequency or have to sign up to all repeating slots, i.e. all classes of a course, select the appropriate option under Can a user make repeating reservations?
- Yes, if the class repeats the user can sign up for more than one, or
- Yes, if the class repeats the user has to sign up for all of them
Press Save changes

Please note that the scheduling system does not allow you to repeat slots and bookings more than 52 times. This is to prevent users from creating an endless series of bookings, which could cause you to exceed the appointment limit of your package. To repeat bookings more than 52 times, users can simply edit their last booking in the series and begin to repeat it again (and again, if needed). Similarly, to repeat slots more often, go to the last slot in the series, click on Edit slot and you will be presented with the option to repeat again.

Be aware that in case bookings require payment upfront, the system will add up the price of each individual slot or booking. The user will then be charged for all the bookings at once. Any available credit will be applied first if the credit system is being used.

Payment and approval

Depending on how you want to use your schedule, you can decide to approve bookings or require payment before confirming them. To set this up, go to Configure > Process and adjust the settings under Require payment or approval?.

Under Require payment or approval? there are several options to choose from:

No payment or approval required this option is selected by default.
Require approval from the administrator before confirming is the option to use if you would like to approve bookings manually. Appointments are then marked as tentative, and the administrator (or superuser) must confirm the booking before it is final and a confirmation is sent. Upon selecting this option, a new option, Send an email to the administrator for each approval request, will appear. Check this option if you want to be notified by email of every new booking pending approval. On the schedule, pending bookings are shown with a lighter shading and are marked with a P in list views such as a user’s agenda.

Note that the option to automatically approve reservations created by a superuser or administrator is set by default.

If you also want to notify one or more superusers or prefer to receive a daily overview instead, you can do so under Should we notify anyone else of a new or changed reservation?. See below for more information.

The last two options are focused on the payment options during the booking process. It is not possible to ask for payment and approval for bookings.

Use the option Complete payment before continuing if you want to ask for (partial) payment and automatically approve (and confirm) reservations once it is received.
Ask for payment, but allow the user to pay later can be used if you want to give your users the option to pay later. For more information on how to set up the payment process, please refer to the Payment section.

Waitlisted users do not pay until they receive a placement only appears in Capacity schedules. This is the only schedule that allows overbooking. With this option you allow users to only pay once they’ve secured a spot.

If a user has been given “unlimited credit”, then their reservations will be approved automatically. This is a useful shortcut to allow people you trust to bypass the approval system. To give someone unlimited credit, first switch on the credit system via Payment Setup.

Connecting to a video conferencing service

SuperSaaS offers several ways to connect with (video) conferencing services like Google Meet, Zoom, Jitsi Meet and Microsoft Teams. The system can automatically create meetings in Google Meet and Zoom. Alternatively, you can manually add meeting links to these or any other conferencing service.

The meeting links are kept hidden from the user until they are registered for a class or have created an appointment. Meeting links will be added to confirmation and reminder emails automatically. Please refer to the section on Video conferencing for a detailed explanation of the setup.

Confirmations and reminders

The SuperSaaS reservation system allows you to send email and/or SMS notifications and reminders. These can be used to confirm bookings to users or notify yourself of new or updated bookings.

Confirmations

By selecting Send a confirmation under Configure > Process, you can choose to send a confirmation to users once their reservation is approved. Users will also be notified of any subsequent changes they make to their bookings or when they delete them altogether. If you want to leave it up to users themselves whether a confirmation should be sent, select Let the user choose whether to send a confirmation instead.

To ensure notifications can be delivered, you may want to verify the email addresses users provide upon registration; this can be done via Access Control. If you do not work with registered users, then at least make sure that the users’ email address is collected upon booking. Also verify that the option Use email address as login under Access Control is not checked.

Please refer to the Daily use section for more information on confirmations when acting on a user’s behalf.

Keep in mind that most messages are not sent when you are logged in as an administrator and creating bookings, since that would quickly flood your mailbox while working on the system. In order to check whether you receive the appropriate messages, first log in as a regular user, as explained in “testing the schedule”.

Reminders

In addition to email confirmations, you can send your users a reminder prior to the start of their appointment or booking. If you set up an SMS gateway (see below), you can choose between email or SMS reminders. In case of the latter you need to make sure that you collect users’ mobile phone numbers upon registration and/or booking. Note that several SMS notification options will be hidden unless you have an SMS gateway set up.

The system also allows you to send users a follow-up email, some time after the start of their appointment or booking. Once you have activated this option, you can edit the content of this message via Configure > Layout (see also Customizing messages and notifications).

You can use the follow-up email as a second reminder by entering a negative number of minutes, hours, days, weeks or months relative to the start of the booking or appointment.

Setting up an SMS gateway

In order to send SMS notifications, you need to have an SMS gateway set up. SuperSaaS does not sell SMS credits, but offers integration with numerous national and international SMS providers (see below for a selection of such providers).

Once you have created an account with one of them, you need to provide your account credentials such as your username and password under SMS Gateway Settings. If your SMS provider requires you to specify a gateway type, then select HTTP

Make sure you enable the SMS gateway by checking Enable the SMS Gateway and saving your changes. The SuperSaaS system will then verify your account credentials with your SMS provider. A status message at the top of the page will indicate success or failure.

If the SMS provider of your choice is not available from the dropdown menu, you may still be able to integrate with them using a webhook. You are also welcome to contact SuperSaaS support to ask us to include it on the feature request list for a future release.

Other notifications

Whether you work with administrator approval or not, you can configure the system to notify you and others about new or updated bookings. You can choose to be notified by email for every individual change or receive an overview once a day. To send these emails to multiple people at once, enter their email addresses in the text field, separated by commas.

If you have set up an SMS gateway (see above), you can also send notifications of new or updated bookings to one or more mobile phone numbers. This is especially useful when you want to be notified of last-minute changes to your schedule.

Process upon completion of a booking

Via Configure > Process you can control where users are taken and/or what page they are shown upon completing a booking. By default, a user remains on the schedule page after completing a booking. The new booking is highlighted on the schedule and above the schedule a message is shown indicating that the booking is created successfully.

Alternatively, you can send the user to their agenda, where they find an overview of all their upcoming bookings. Another option is to provide a URL where users are redirected to upon completing their bookings. It is recommended that the page users are redirected to clearly shows that their booking was completed successfully. Redirecting users to your homepage without any confirmation is confusing for your users.

To aid tracking of successful bookings, use ‘magic words’ $name, $id, $price, $slot_id, $email, $lang or $full_name in the URL, which will be replaced by the appointment’s login name, ID, price, slot ID, email or full name respectively. You can then extract that information with a script on the page where you send the user to, to collect that information, or save it in a server log to process later.

Via Layout Settings you can specify the URL where users are taken when they log out from SuperSaaS (or click your logo, provided it is shown). This can be a different URL and using your homepage would be appropriate here.