How to: Setup Availability

In the newest version of Elmo Anywhere you can setup availability for your Employees and your Shops. This allows the Scheduling module to draw itself with hours of operation setup for a shop; as well as shade times slots a slight gray color to indicate that an installer is not available or a darker gray when the shop may be closed.

COMING SOON: Automatic installation booking via API, let customers book install jobs on Quotes they have generated on your website. Availability is used to determine when a job can be booked for.

To configure Availability you can find a tab called Schedule on the Shop popup editor; or Schedule on the Staff popup editor.

The Default Availability determines what times that are not defined in the grid will have their availability set to. By default this is Open/Available, so any shop or installer you setup will always be available by default. You can add records that are defining an Unavailable/Closed time slot and leave the default set to open and it should only shade scheduler cells that are defined as blacked out accordingly. Think of this as a way to setup vacation time for someone who normally would work all hours a shop is open, this is the easiest configuration with very minimal setup.

To take the functionality a step further, if you would like to explicitly set the Open/Available times it is suggested that you set the Default Availability to Closed/Unavailable. This will shade only cells defined as Open in white, Cells defined as closed in grey, and then the remaining undefined cells will also be shaded to gray (closed state).

Note: Defining Open Times, Dates, etc with the Default Availability set to Open/Available will result in only blackout times being shaded and ALL other times set to open Available. This is usually not the configuration you would be looking for.

 

To Create and Availability Record:

  1. Click the Add new record button on the grid.
  2. You should be presented with an editor like this:
  3. Fill in the Criteria for Dates/Times. In this Editor Start Dates and Times must come before End Dates and Times. You do not need to define both a Start & an End; defining only a start will make a rule apply indefinitely after the start date. Defining only an end will have the rule apply from now until the end.
  4. Days can be defined in any order, a rule can Start on Friday and end on Monday. You can also define a single day rule as Starting Friday & Ending on Friday.
  5. Select the Availability status: the logic for this applying to the scheduler applies as follows.
  • Closed/Unavailable, then Open/Available, then finally Default Availability - until a match is found

Once you are done setting up your availability rule click the save button in the lower right hand corner. You're changes to the Shop/Employee availability will not save until you save the Shop/Employee Record as well.