BookingLive User Guide

Introduction

This guide is designed and written for users with no prior knowledge of BookingLive and aims to provide you with the basic information and workflows you require in order to utilise the platform day-to-day. This guide may link off to other, separate, pages of our knowledge base if you wish to learn about more in-depth features of the system. 

The workflow below should assist new users and provide quick links.

Start Up

The BookingLive system is made up of three parts:

• Website/Booking Pages - What your customer uses to book your products

• MyAccount - An area for the customer to view their bookings and other information

• Admin Portal - A secure administrative portal allowing you - the client - to manage your booking system.

All the day-to-day administration of your BookingLive system takes place within the Admin Portal and all of the information in this guide will relate to this area unless otherwise specified. 

Logging into the Admin Portal

To access your admin system, you will need to go to the following URL: x.bookinglive.com/admin (where x is your site-domain).  You will need a username and password. Usernames and passwords can only be given by the site's administrator.

If you don't have a username or password, please use the forgotten password link and failing that please contact support.

Important Notice

When logging into Booking Live we strongly advise you use Google Chrome, as other browsers are prone to discrepancies in the displaying of some modules.

Chrome is free to download and will improve your browsing experience in general. Please visit http://www.google.com/chrome/

Dashboard

Welcome to the BookingLive Admin Portal. Once you have logged in you will first see the Dashboard. The information displayed on this screen will vary depending on your system but will look something like this:

Basic Management

In order to allow someone to book onto an event, you need to have set up the following items in your BookingLive system:

• Location - The general place where the resources are  (e.g - Bridgechester Town Hall)

• Resource - The specific bookable items, like rooms, or equipment  (e.g Civic Suite, Melrose Room, Climbing Wall)

• Booking Forms - The information you want to collect about the Purchaser and the Participant/s (e.g First Name, Last Name, Email address, Shoe size)

• Product - The item that the customer can book. The Product holds all the information about what would be booked, like Pricing, Attributes or age restrictions.  (e.g 1 hour Climbing Wall session, Paintballing)

• Event - The actual date/s which are available to be booked, how many people can book onto them and where they are occuring.

Locations & Resources

Locations are essentially containers for the Resources which can be booked. If you operate a Climbing Centre, for example, the Climbing Centre itself would be set up as the Location, and the Resources might be Climbing Wall (Zone 1), Climbing Wall (Zone 2), Bouldering Area. 

When someone makes a booking, they will take availability away from a particular Resource and the rest of the Resources at that location will be unaffected (unless you choose to set them up Sub-Resources).

Locations

To manage Locations and Resources, in the left hand menu, go to: Settings > Resources

The first screen that loads is the Resources screen, to manage Locations, click on the Location tab at the top of the page:

A Location must be set up before you can create any Resources. The location screen will list any locations which have been set up already in your system. 

• To view information about an existing location, simply click on it. 

• To create a new Location, click the “Add Location” button. 

Locations are one of the most basic elements in the system and therefore require the least configuration. Simply giving a Location a Name is enough. Once you have done this, you should click “Save & Close”. 

You may also find the following Location fields useful : 

Once a Location has been set up, you can start creating Resources.

Resources

Resources are managed from the main Resources screen which can be reached at Settings > Resources, or if you are already in that area of the system, by clicking on the Resource tab:

• To view information about an existing resource, simply click on it. 

• To create a new Resource, click the “Add Resource” button. 

A Resource requires a little extra configuration than a Location. The following fields are required:

Additionally you may find the following optional fields useful:

Once a Location and a Resource have been set up, it is a good idea to then make sure your Booking forms have all the information in them that you want to collect from your Purchasers and Participants.

Booking Forms

A Booking Form collects all the relevant information that you need about a specific person, for example:

Purchaser Details (Required)

The details of the person paying or placing the order. The order may be for them or for someone else, but regardless you will need to collect some information from the person who is at their computer/phone/tablet making the booking. 

There are three required fields which every order must collect as a bare minimum for the BookingLive system to complete their order and store their information. These are:

After this, and with all the rest of the Booking Forms the information collected is completely optional.

Participant Details (optional)

The details of the person/people attending the booking. This is completely optional and the system can take bookings without taking participant information, or automatically assuming that the purchaser is the participant.

If you do decide to collect participant information, the amount of information that can be collected is virtually unlimited. 

Related Members Details (optional)

There are then several form types, which come under the general heading of “related members” these are:

• Doctor

• Next of Kin

• Parent

• Emergency Contact 

• General

These forms allow for information to be collected about additional people who are related to a specific Participant, but keeps that information separate from the Participant’s and treats it as if it was a separate person. 

Using Booking Forms

The Booking Forms can be managed by going to Settings > Booking Pages > Booking Forms (tab).

On this screen you will see a list of the Booking Forms that are currently set up on your system. They may not all be actively in use, and some products may even be using multiple of them. This is set up on the Products themselves and will be covered in the Products section of this guide.

What Booking Forms you have set up is entirely dependent on the information you want to collect when people make a booking. Also you can name these Booking Forms and the fields within them however you want. Therefore it is difficult to provide a guide for this section of the Enterprise system without it being a little abstract.

On all systems, however, you should see a “Purchaser” form. As mentioned above, every system can only have one of these and it must contain at least the First name, Last name, and Email address fields.

You may also see a “No Participant” form. This form is used by the system when you do not wish to collect participant information for a booking.

Finally, you may also see other custom Booking Forms which have been set up, like “Participant”, “Adult”, “Child”, “Doctor”, “Swimming classes 7+”. These are the forms that either yourselves or a BookingLive staff member have created in order to collect the information you require. 

• To view information about an existing Booking Form, simply click on it. 

• To create a new Booking Form, click the “Add Booking Form” button. 

Creating/Editing Booking Forms

There are three initial fields when you create or edit a Booking Form. These are:

The key field here is the “Type” field. The “Purchaser” Booking Form should always be set to use the “Purchaser” type. No other Booking Form should use this type. The vast majority of clients will then only need to create additional Booking Forms using the type “Participant”. However, as mentioned previously, if you need to collect information like Doctor details it is recommended that you create a Booking Form of the relevant type.

Booking Form Fields

Within the Booking Form, you are able to add a series of Booking Form Fields to the Booking Form to control the data you are capturing from your customers.

The BookingLive system comes pre-loaded with a whole host of Booking Form Field types that the system will recognise and know what to do with. For example, the Email address type field will correctly validate against email address formats. The Post Code field type can be used in conjunction with the Post Code Lookup credits to auto fill a person’s address. 

These field types can be viewed whenever you want to create a new Booking Form Field. To do this, on the Booking Form Edit screen, click the “Add Booking Field” button:

You will find the dropdown where you can select the field type, about half way down the page:

If you want to create your own Custom field, scroll this dropdown to the bottom and you will see an “New Custom Field” option. Select this and then click on the “Save” button, not “Save and Close”.

Doing this will reload the page and show you some additional fields which you will then need to populate.

When you have finished making your field, click “Save and Close”.

As you add new fields to a Booking Form they will show as a list on the Booking Forms screen:

The order of these fields will be the same when they are presented to the customer, so in the above example the Firstname field will be the first field on this Booking Form that the customer will enter information into, then the Simple Field 1 field.

You can reorder these fields by clicking and holding the left hand side of the row and then dragging that row up or down:

There are two further options on each field:

Once you have finished setting up your booking forms, you are ready to add a Product into the system.

Products

A product is an individual item that can be booked or sold via your BookingLive system. Products can be activities, tours, appointments, courses, events, pitches, courts, parks etc.

How to add a new product

1. Settings > Products

2. Click on Actions in the top-right

3. Select “Add Product”

4. Provide a “Name” and “Type” of Product

5. Click Save

6. Once the product has saved, you will be provided with additional options, based on the type of Product you are using. See the relevant Product page below for more details.

Types of Products

• Single Event - This is a standard, single and fixed in advance event purchase - for example a single class on cooking skills

• Multi Event - Similar to a single event - except it is a series of events being sold as one product - e.g. a cookery class every Monday at 7pm for 10 weeks

• Availability Product - A product whose event availability is set based on opening and close times with minimum duration requirements. Duration increments can be set with the ability for customers to select the times and repeat their selection with ease.

• Template Event - This is similar to an appointment event but can involve many resources and the events created are from a fixed template... e.g. one hour on "play area" followed by one hour on either "party room one" or "party room two"

• Membership - A Recurring payment to gain access to your services.

• Vouchers - Sell Vouchers for your events from our system, or allow redemption of external vouchers.

Upsells

• Linking Upsells - Details on how to link Upsells to your Products in different ways.

• Event Upsells - Products that can be sold during the booking process and will display based on the events selected.

• Physical Item - Items that are more standard "e-commerce" and do not require booking resources for periods of time - e.g. a t shirt or baseball cap, which do not have availability and that can be upsold during the booking 

• Mandatory Upsells - Items that your customer must select in order to continue the booking

  
  
  
  
  

Additional settings & information

• Product Groups - Details on how to Group your products together and utilise related features.

• Waiting List - Details on how to utilise the Waiting List feature on Products.

• Booking Views - Details on what the different Booking Views look like and function.

• Product Timeline - Automate messages and other functions by date.

• PDFs - Create PDFs automatically, with merge fields for your products.

• Product Event Order - Provide early access to events for your returning customers.

• Attributes - Add keywords against Products, to help your customers find the right event

• Product Pricing - Offer multiple pricing bands for the same Product

Finally, unless you are using the Availability Product type, you will need to create some events so that your customers can book onto these Products.

Events

Events can be created through Settings > Events. This will load a screen showing a list of all the events currently created in your system.

• To view information about an existing Event, simply click on it. 

• To create new Events, click the “Actions” button and choose from one of the options below.

The Create Event option allows you to create one single event at a time. This option also provides you with all of the options that are available for an Event. This is also what you see when you edit an event.

To create multiple events or use the Create Event Series action, select the Create Events option.

Entering into the event creator will display a number of fields, the mandatory fields are highlighted in Red (and in italic below). These options include:

From this display you have the option to create one single Ad-Hoc OR Regularly recurring events at set times and dates. Note, you can add multiple days, and multiple times throughout that day, as well as multiple products in one go!

An example of this view below will create 4 events per day, Monday - Friday starting from 1st June until the 30th November: