Hi Howard,

Thank you for your inquiry.

At the moment the only option to manage this is to connect all employees that share the laser machine to the same Google or Outlook calendar. In that way when an appointment is added for one of the employees it will be automatically added to their shared calendar and all other employees will be unavailable for the same time slot. 

More about our Google sync and how to set it you can read here, and more about Outlook sync you can read here. You don't have to set both, just the one that you prefer. 

Best regards.

Hello Howard

You need to link only the employees that are providing this service to the same Google Calendar. Other employees will be able to accept other services.

If you have 5 employees assigned to this, and other services, then this would be a problem, since if Employee 1 is booked for the laser machine service, Employees 2 - 5 will be unavailable for other services as well.

Our developers are going to be working on Capacity per Location in the future, so this will be a lot easier to resolve, but at the moment, linking employees to the same calendar is the only option.

Services already have defined capacity, Howard, but if every employee can provide appointments for that service, the number of employees will multiply available time slots.

So, if your service's capacity is 2, and you have 5 employees, one time slot will be offered 5 times - once per employee.

If you were to create a custom location only for the laser machines, and if capacity per location was implemented, you would be able to achieve this.

At the moment, this can't be done.

Hello again Howard

I really can't say anything about a feature that hasn't been developed yet. Our developers are yet to start working on capacity per location, and at the moment that's what we're calling it.

It could be capacity per service, per location, per customer. I don't know until it goes through planning. All aspects need to be covered on paper before it reaches the code exactly to avoid conflicts with different approaches, like the one you described here.

Hello Nico

The development team has been focused on features that were requested more frequently by our customers, and the features that were already under development.

They are still covering aspects that would include capacity per location, or limit the capacity of the service for all employees, but I still can't say when it will be resolved.

Another option would be to swap employees for services, so if "Machine1" was the service, you could create a "Machine1" employee, and rename the "employee" string through Customize to "service", or whatever you want it to be. Then, instead of service names, create as many services as you have employees and rename the strings in Customize. This would limit this Service (in Amelia - employee actually) so when one of the employees is booked, that same service would not be available anymore.

I hope you understand where I'm going with this.

I'm sorry to hear that, Nico.

We spoke about the "capacity per location" feature yesterday, and it has been decided that this feature will be developed in the next few months. I cannot guarantee that there will be no setbacks that push it further into the future, nor do I have an exact ETA, but it should be implemented before 2022.

Hello there.

Unfortunately, I can't provide you guys with an ETA yet. The feature is planned for the next development sprint, so it should be included in our 2nd or 3rd update from now (one should be released today, so the one after that, or the one after that).

The feature requires a lot of coding and logic changes. We don't provide ETAs for features this big, as there can always be some issues that come up, that delay the development and the release.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi again.

Capacity per location is a big feature, and our developers are still working on it. I can't still provide an ETA, but I do hope that it will be released before 2022.

Sorry for the delay!

Happy festive season to you as well! Thank you!

The development team had a meeting last week, and "capacity per location" has been added as a priority. Due to its size, it will probably be released in mid-February.

Since we can't guarantee that, don't hold me on that, but we'll try to do it as soon as possible, and I hope we won't move into March.

Hello Allan

Our team is currently working on Resource Booking and Capacity Per Location. It should be complete by June, but I can't make that promise, as a lot of things can postpone the release.

We can't speed it up any further, since the development is already on the way, but we need to test all other (existing) features of the plugin before these two features are included in one of our future updates. If you choose to go for a 3rd party developer, and develop this, every new update will most likely not be useful for you because 3rd parties (like WP Kraken, for example) develop add-ons that work only for the version they were developed for, so all upcoming updates would most likely not be useful for you.

Also, it would eventually become a waste of money since we are going to release these features in a couple of months. I can understand that this is an urgent matter for you, but there's nothing you or me can do to speed it up any further.