So, the recurring appoinrments work really well. You can make one to many field members a recurring appointment sfor any amount of time to any day for ever. It doesn’t get more flexible than that and it is a great feature. But, displayng this information is a problem. On the plus side none of our competitors do it well. On the minus side, we don’t so it well either.

The problem is that recurring appontments generally for gardeners but sometimes for cleraner too occur monthly. So, if you only have a large calendar that scrolls to a month, you are only going to see the next appointment before you do a lot of clicking.

So first kets start off with making a recurring appointment. we need a tweak here

recurring

Then we need to think about how we display this information clearly to the user, so I think this. When we make a recurring appointment depending on what time frame is selected i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,  it displays by that calendar.

 

so, daily can stay with the calndar we have now

weekly and monthly can share a calendar and yearly can just display multiple monthlies for the moment. They should look like this.

monthlyNow we need to change the appointments. At the moment there is a big long list. This isn’t very useful for a recuring appointment. It goes on too long. so we need to hide the recurring appointment (picture at bottom) in a concertina that reveals when clicked (like the sites section in accounts). Then we need to change the info displayed slightly. So where it says ‘swap this with we need to change the heading to instance and the info to display will be ‘once’ if it is a job or project or a quote. if it is a recurring appointment it will say ‘every’ ‘x’ ‘time frame’ so every ‘5’ ‘days’ for example.

data Now it gets even more tricky. Because there are some scenarios that have arisen from the cleaning companies. and that is ‘what if someone has a cleaning job every monday?’ So, at the moment we can only select by the days but obviously even if you select a recurring appointment every 7 days it will end up on a differnt day every week. so we need to have an option to select for example ‘every monday’ or ‘every wednesday’ how would we go about that? It can be done because they d it on Google Calendar… https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/W_InqiZznrY and there must be some clues here too and for batch invoicing https://getjobber.com/features/scheduling/job-scheduling-wizard/

concertina

 

Written By

Adrian Portsmouth