Rooms/Resources is a feature in Acuity that can be used when you have multiple Calendars* in your account, and also have a limited amount of resources to be shared across all Calendars.
*Multiple Calendars are available on the Growing plan or higher.
When to use Rooms/Resources:
If you have multiple Calendars that represent each staff member of your organization (or each individual location), Rooms/Resources can then share or reserve a limited number of rooms (or cars, or other types of shared equipment) across all Calendars.
The Rooms/Resources feature is used behind the scenes to avoid overbooking; a resource isn't offered up as an option to clients or to admins. In other words, neither the client nor the admin will be able to schedule inside a specific Room/Resource.
When not to use Rooms/Resources:
Don't use Rooms/Resources if you are using multiple Calendars to represent the rooms themselves. For example, if you have separate rooms that each have their own available hours, setting them up as individual calendars will allow clients to schedule appointments appropriately, without the use of the Rooms/Resources feature.
Using Calendars to represent Rooms does allow a client to schedule an appointment in that specific room on the Client's Scheduling Page.
If you want to pool availability for several calendars, read this guide.
Additionally, if you have calendars across multiple timezones, resources will not function.
Appointment Types and Resources
Rooms/Resources allows you to ensure that a certain resource is available when an appointment is scheduled. Clients won't see these; Rooms/Resources act as a restriction in addition to your Availability and Scheduling Limits.
For example, if you employ 5 therapists to share 3 rooms for their in-person appointments, you would need to create a Resource for "Rooms" to make sure that at least one room is available when an in-person appointment is scheduled.
Here is an example:
- Create a separate Calendar for each therapist
- Create a resource for "Rooms" with a quantity of 3 that applies to your in-person Appointment Type:
- Now when someone books an in-person appointment, it will require one room. This means that the most in-person appointments that can be booked at one time is 3, because after that you’re out of rooms. Once all rooms are used up other therapists can still accept phone appointments though, since the resource doesn't apply to that Appointment Type.
Keep in mind:
- If an Appointment Type relies on multiple resources then all resources must be available for that appointment to be booked.
- Appointments will use the resource for the duration of the appointment plus any padding.
- Negative padding for overlapping appointments will be ignored; only positive padding will be included.
Classes and Resources
Classes can also rely on Rooms/Resources, but for multi-person Appointment Types or Classes, only one Resource will be consumed for the entirety of the attendees (each attendee in the class will not consume a Resource).
For example, if you have 3 rooms and offered a "Group Therapy" Class, only one room would be deducted from the "Rooms" Resource. That way, the other two rooms can still be used for other in-person appointments.
Keep in mind:
- If a class relies on a resource, it will consume 1 spot of the resource for the offering even when nobody has scheduled into the class yet.
- Resources can only be set-up by the Acuity account admin.
Resources to Prevent Double-Booking ⚓
If you work alone but have more than one calendar (or have two people sharing one room), you can use resources to avoid being booked on two calendars at the same time.
You do this by creating a resource and setting the quantity to one (since you can only be in one place at a time). Once this is set up, clients can only book one appointment at a time across all calendars.
Here's how to set it up:
- Go to Business Settings > Availability > Rooms/Resources.
- Click the New Resource button.
- Name the resource. (The resource name will not be visible to clients.)
- Set the quantity to 1.
- Click the box next to Check All, to apply the resource to all appointment types.
- Click Create Resource.
