Core concepts
Services and resources
A service is what a customer is asking for. A resource is what you have to give them. Services describe demand and how long it takes; resources describe supply and stop two people being promised the same chair.
Demand and supply
Almost every scheduling problem gets simpler once these two are separated. “A haircut takes forty minutes” is a fact about the service. “Priya can do one at a time and works Tuesday to Saturday” is a fact about the resource. Keeping them apart means you describe each thing once, and the product works out what can actually happen.
Services — what and how long
- A name customers recognise
- A duration, and an optional buffer after it
- An optional price
- Whether it is for walk-ins, bookings or both
- How much notice it needs, and how far ahead it can be booked
- Which branches offer it
Resources — who or what does it
- A person, chair, room, desk or machine
- How many visits it handles at once
- How fast it works, relative to the standard duration
- Its own hours, or the location's
- Which services it can perform
- Which branches it works at
Both are optional
A shop with one undifferentiated line needs neither. People join, you call them in order, everybody is served the same way. Adding services and resources to that is bureaucracy with no payoff.
They start earning their keep when:
- Different visits take noticeably different lengths of time — that is when a service duration makes wait estimates honest rather than decorative.
- Different staff do different things, and a customer waiting for one of them cannot be served by another.
- You take bookings at all. Slots are generated from service durations and resource availability; without them there is nothing to generate from.
Categories
Both services and resources can be grouped into categories. For services this is mostly about the customer's experience — a list of thirty services is a wall of text, whereas “Colour”, “Cutting” and “Treatments” is a decision. For resources it is mostly about your own organisation: “Stylists”, “Rooms”, “Chairs”.
How they meet
On a booking
The customer picks a service. Its duration decides how long a slot is; its notice rules decide how soon and how far ahead it can be booked. Resources that can perform that service, and are working at that time, and are not already claimed, decide which slots exist at all. Confirming the booking takes that resource out of circulation for the duration.
On a waitlist visit
The service is what the customer says they need, and its duration feeds the wait estimate. Resources set the location's throughput — how many visits can be in progress at once and how fast they move — which is what turns a position in line into a number of minutes.
A service is never looser than its location
Service rules narrow what the location already allows; they never widen it. A service can require more notice than the branch does, but it cannot be booked outside the branch's booking hours because the service says so.
Asking for two things at once
Letting a customer select several services in one visit is safe when any one resource could deliver all of them — a general practitioner doing a check-up and a prescription review in the same appointment.
It is risky when the services need different specialists. Booking a colour and a cut as one visit implies one person for the whole block, and if those are two different stylists the schedule is wrong before anybody arrives. Where your resources are specialised, steer customers toward separate visits.
Setting them up
Your account was seeded with a few services matched to the industry you chose at signup, so there is something to edit rather than a blank page. See services and resources for the fields on each.