Availability in Check Cherry

0:00 In this video, we're going to walk through all of the availability settings in Check Cherry. How to control when you can be booked, how to prevent double bookings, manage staff time off, and set your customerf facing change and cancellation policies. Let's get started. Start off by going to manage business settings, availability. The first thing you'll want to set up is your availability

0:21 limits. This is where you tell Check Cherry how many bookings you can handle at once and what your general availability looks like. At the top, you'll see a business-wide setting section. The first option here is simultaneous bookings. This is the maximum number of bookings you can service at the same time. If you're a solo operator with one photo booth, you'd set this to one, or you can

0:43 leave it blank for no limit. Next, you can set whether you're available every day of the week. If you can only do weekends, this will prevent customers from booking you on days you're not available. How much lead time do you need before a booking? You can require anywhere from a few hours to several weeks of notice before accepting a new booking. The furthest out setting controls how far

1:03 in advance customers can book you. Then you'll see, does a booking block an entire day or just the scheduled time. If you're going on site to a wedding, that event likely takes up your whole day. But if clients come to your studio, choose just the schedule time. Below the businesswide settings, you can get more granular and set limits per package. This is especially useful for photo

1:25 booth businesses where you might have two of one type of booth and only one type of another. You can set the simultaneous booking limit for each package individually, overriding the businesswide setting where needed. Keep in mind that check cherry checks limits at every level. Package group, individual package, and businesswide. If any of those limits are reached,

1:47 that time slot will be locked. Availability rules let you handle more complex inventory situations, specifically when multiple packages or add-ons share the same physical equipment. Let's say you have one photo booth. That booth is used by several of your packages. Your standard package, your premium package, and maybe also a photo booth add-on that can be added to a DJ or event package.

2:10 An availability rule let you group all of those together so Check Cherry knows they all share that single piece of equipment. You can then set a max bookings limit on the role itself. For example, a limit of one means only one of those bookings can be active at a time. Check Cherry also has dedicated support for double-sided backdrops right here in availability

2:33 rules. If you have a backdrop that has, say, a gold sequin side and a silver sequin side, you can create a double-sided backdrop pairing. Once that's set up, as soon as one side is booked, the other side will automatically become unavailable. This prevents you from accidentally double booking a two-sided backdrop. It's a great idea to use the test availability tool

2:53 to make sure everything is working as expected. You can enter an event date, start time, end time, and then choose what you want to check against. You can check availability for a package, add-on, backdrop, extra, staff member, appointment type, or your business as a whole. If you have a team, you'll want to configure your staff availability settings. The key option here is whether time

3:16 off requests from staff members require admin approval. If you toggle this to yes, your staff can submit time off requests, but they won't take effect until you review and approve them. If it's set to no, staff can manage their own availability directly. Choose what makes sense for the way your business operates. The change policy section is where you control what customers can

3:37 and can't do after they've received or accepted a booking. There are three subsections here. At the top is your online booking policy. This lets you set how much notice you need before accepting a new booking and how far out you'll accept bookings. Next is the proposal section. This controls what customers can customize before they accept a proposal you've sent them.

4:00 You can choose whether customers are allowed to add or remove add-ons, add or remove extras, and whether they can choose their own backdrop before accepting. Each of these can also be overridden on individual proposals, so you have full flexibility. Now, something to note is that changing these settings will not affect proposals that have already been sent to your customers.

4:22 The confirmed booking section controls what customers can change after their booking is locked in. First, you can toggle whether customers are allowed to make changes at all. If you set this to yes, you then control how far in advance they can make changes. You can also set a separate window for cancellations. For example, customers can only cancel up to one week before the event.

4:47 And there's a setting for questionnaires. Specifically, how long before the event customers can unlock and re-edit a questionnaire they've already submitted. If you want questionnaires to be final once submitted, set this to customers cannot unlock their questionnaires. Otherwise, you can give them a window to make [clears throat] edits. Blockout dates let you block off specific

5:05 days or time ranges so customers can't book you. If you go to sales calendar and click add new and select blockout date, you'll enter a start date and end date. If it's a full day, like a vacation week, you can check the all day box. If it's only a partial day, you can set specific start and end times. You can also add a reason note for your own reference. This is internal and won't be

5:29 shown to customers. Once saved, blockout dates will show up on your calendar. You can filter to view them by clicking the blockout dates toggle in the calendar legend. And if you want to go into a deep dive on integrating your calendar inside Check Cherry, check this video out here. And that's it. That's a full walkthrough of the availability settings in Check Cherry. And always,

5:50 if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our support staff. will always be glad to help