Ready or not, the holiday season is upon us, and that means days off for your employees. Starting with Halloween, the fall and winter months bring appointment calendars at businesses across the norther hemisphere full of requests for days off. Halloween parties, ski trips, Thanksgiving celebrations, Christmas vacation and New Years plans should give your workers cause to abandon you every week until the end of 2011.
This torrent of sick days and PTO requests has caused many employers to tackle the problem head-on with online appointment scheduling, mobile time-off requests and an online approval process so that employers are not left in the lurch this holiday season.
With online appointments, employers can get a real-time view of their calendar by day, week and month, including how many people have requested days off. This should allow business owners to see when they are short-staffed and prepare for it ahead of time.
Many online appointment calendars also can be synced with e-mail and allow access to employees. Never again will your employees be able to claim they didn't know their work schedule. This increased transparency and alert system will reduce missed shifts and increase employee accountability. When you are done creating your employee-facing calendar, online scheduling software programs allow you to take customer bookings and arrange them based on the days you have the most staff. If you are short-staffed, try to schedule appointments on days when you have more employees present. This way, you will not be unprepared to handle the busiest retail season of the year.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
To get paid or not to get paid...
One of the highlights of our job in Bookeo is that we get to know many, many small business owners, from the most diverse backgrounds. This gives us a chance to learn about the different ways in which people like to do business.
And there are many different ways!
In the recent weeks a feature request was coming up quite frequently: the ability to let customers to choose between paying online at the time of the booking, or paying later.
We've worked hard to implement flexible online payments, with deposits, cancellation fees, multiple card charges, and so on, so we were a bit surprised by this request. After all, we thought, if given the chance, who would prefer to pay now instead of paying later?
Well it turns out that there are many reasons. Some people are just not confident in paying online. Some do not have a credit card. So they prefer to pay at the time of the visit. Others are just paying for someone else (ex. a music lesson for their children), so they prefer to pay online.
Well, problem solved! You can now accept online payments/deposits and leave your customers the option to pay later instead. Simply enable the option to 'Allow deferred payment', input your own custom message, and... give your customers the extra choice.
And there are many different ways!
In the recent weeks a feature request was coming up quite frequently: the ability to let customers to choose between paying online at the time of the booking, or paying later.
We've worked hard to implement flexible online payments, with deposits, cancellation fees, multiple card charges, and so on, so we were a bit surprised by this request. After all, we thought, if given the chance, who would prefer to pay now instead of paying later?
Well it turns out that there are many reasons. Some people are just not confident in paying online. Some do not have a credit card. So they prefer to pay at the time of the visit. Others are just paying for someone else (ex. a music lesson for their children), so they prefer to pay online.
Well, problem solved! You can now accept online payments/deposits and leave your customers the option to pay later instead. Simply enable the option to 'Allow deferred payment', input your own custom message, and... give your customers the extra choice.
allow deferred payment
the customer can choose
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