The Fast Booking Widget: what it does, and why you’ll love it

You may notice something different next time you log into your account: we’ve added a new tab on the top left of your calendar, called fast booking. As the name suggests, this feature allows you to do a quick search for booking slot availability. It might not sound like much, but this little tool is going to allow you to search every inch of your calendar for available slots, quickly and easily.  

Why are we so excited about this feature? 

Fast booking throws your calendar wide open. It gives you lots of different ways to access availability for the exact constellation of service, resources, and times you want. Here are two use cases that highlight just how powerful this tool is.

Use case one: say you’re a physiotherapist and you need to add a series of treatment slots, one slot a week for six consecutive weeks. The fast booking widget can list all available slots for you for the next six weeks, resource specific or not - your choice. To book, you just need to select your preferred slots that appear at the bottom of the widget (when you click on them, they turn green). Click continue, select the customer, and you’re done.

Any users with packed schedules who struggle to find availability for their customers will appreciate how much time and stress this saves.

Use case two: say you need to find availability for an internal video conference for all staff, across multiple time zones. Click on the widget, add the team members you want to have a meeting with, and select how much time you need for the meeting.  A list of available slots will appear at the bottom of the widget. 

Below we break down exactly what the fast booking widget can do for you.

Search by booking length. Now you don’t even need to select a service: just add a name for your meeting, select the length of time the booking should be, and hit “find availability”. Done!

Search availability by services. If you search for a service, you don’t need to add resources to your search: we’ll auto-filter available slots with the resources you’ve identified as being able to perform that service. 

Filter by the time of day. If you have a customer who has availability for say, lunch times only, you can simply select the early afternoon time window (12 noon to 3pm).

Do a 24hr search. Now you have the option to search literally every minute of your Calendar for availability (well, 23 hours and 55 minutes, to be precise). What this means in practical terms, is that you can search for availability outside of a resource’s working and/or booking times. It also means you can select to search within resources’ working times, or online booking times only. This comes into play if your resources have different working and booking times.

Search a specific window of time. Select from what date onwards future available slots should display. You can search a whole two years into the future!

Add follow up bookings: after you schedule a booking, the success window gives you a new option: to add a follow up booking for the same customer.

Some things haven’t changed…

• You can still edit the service length. Say you select a service that’s usually one hour long, you can go ahead and book this service and allocate it a different time length.  

• You can allocate coloured booking tags to your bookings, as always.

• And you can still add booking intervals to your bookings.

The fast booking widget is for Enterprise users. If you would like to trial Enterprise for free, you can upgrade for two weeks straight from your TIMIFY account. Or go to our website and start a chat with one of our friendly CRM team who will be happy to get you access.