The real-time calendar availability option allows your customers to choose an exact time for a shoot within your booking form. Rela will determine availability based on your team's schedule and allow customers to book a specific time.
When an order is placed, Rela's scheduling system will assign the best available shooter based on the priority rules that you've set.
To enable this feature, head over to your Schedule Settings dashboard from your store:
Choose the option highlighted below:
Configuration Steps:
1. Add timing to your services and products
The first thing you'll need to do is add the time it takes to complete each of your services. This allows Rela to determine the total time each job will take so that we can show the available time options to your customer in the booking calendar.
The green checkbox indicates that you've added the timing correctly.
The blue dot indicates that the service does not require time to complete.
If you are using Packages, the package will use the sum of each product's timing by default, BUT... you can override this on a per-package basis from the Package Editor.
2. Connect to your Google Calendar
Be sure to connect to your Google Calendar and make sure you timezone is correct. You can also choose which calendars within your Google Calendar account you would like to use to determine your availability.
3. Hours of Operation
Set your hours of operation to ensure customers only book shoots when you're open.
You can also sync these times to all of your shooters by checking the Sync option at the bottom of the form.
4. Add Your Photographers to the Booking Calendar
Add the shooters that you want to make available in the booking calendar. Rela's scheduling system will look at each of your shooters' availability via their Google Calendar in order to determine available shoot times when a customer is placing an order. Make sure to fill each shooters Home Base location and Max Travel Distance, and working hours. If they haven't yet connected their Google Calendar, you can send them an email with instructions by clicking the Fix button next to their name.
5. Choose your assignment method
The assignment option that you choose will determine the priority in which a shooter is automatically assigned to a job.
Closest Proximity will choose the shooter that is closest to the job location based on their Home Base location.
The Manual Priority option will allow you to drag and drop the shooters into the order of selection priority.
6. Same-Day Booking and Time Buffer
Toggle the same-day booking option to allow customer to book a shoot the same day.
Set your time buffer to prevent back-to-back bookings and to provide your shooters enough time to travel and set up for the next shoot.
