Release Notes: Q1+ 2022 - Employee Schedules

In the first quarter (almost third) of 2022 we've made a huge number of updates for Dog Trainers and Dog Daycares. We'd like to highlight a few of these changes and how they benefit your business and your clients.

Employee Schedules/Availability Engine

We have revisited the availability engine to better match the process and needs of trainers and daycares. Previously schedules for services could only be set on a weekly recurring basis. ie. A user was available to perform this service on Monday from 9am-5pm. Now, you can still set a weekly recurring schedule, if you'd like, but you're also able to set it for specific days of the year, like holidays or upcoming changes to a regular schedule. We've also made it simpler to set different schedules for different users and services - add as many schedules as you need to suit your business.

Additionally, for daycares or training businesses that may have part-time staff we've also added the ability to export the hours for each employee making it easier for you to do payroll.

Client Self-Booking Redesign

Creating a simple user experience and user interface is an important focus for us at BusyPaws, we focus the most heavily on the aspects that your clients will interact with. The client self-booking process is the most heavily used feature of the system so it's important for it to be reliable and simple for your clients to use. We reviewed all pages of the process and updated them to be more clear where possible (either by removing details or adding more clear indicators), and making it more brand agnostic to allow it to more seamlessly fit into your brand process.

Discount Codes

Would you like to offer special discounts to specific groups of clients, returning customers, or seasonal pricing? Create a discount code and share your code with your clients for them to redeem before collecting payment. Discount codes can be set as a percentage of the total price or as a fixed amount.

Payments Updates (Optional, Deposits, Partial)

Offering flexibility for you to collect payment for your services simplifies your process and increases clarity for your clients. Previously when a client was self-booking there were only two options for payment: Required or none. When set to required the system would generate an invoice and collect payment prior to the booking being confirmed. Now there are two additional options for your to choose from:

• Optional: Will generate an invoice and register the booking for the client - at that point the client can choose to pay the invoice if they'd like, otherwise you can collect payment on the generated invoice at any time that suits you.
• Deposit: Will generate an invoice and require payment for the portion that you set as a deposit before the booking is created.

Additionally, when you have a generated invoice you may now collect payments on that invoice in any increment you'd like up to the maximum for the invoice. For example, on a $100 invoice, you may collect 5 x $20 payments, if you'd like.

Quality-of-Life Updates

Lastly, there were dozens of smaller updates made across the system to make your life more pleasant while using BusyPaws daily. In no particular order:

• Email Signatures: Set a standard email signature for yourself which will be attached to all messages sent by your user account. Set in your profile settings.
• Pets in Dynamic Emails: There are a few options for dynamic content within your automated messages, like {first_name}. Now you can also add {pet_names} which will insert the client's pets that were registered on the booking associated to the email.
• Public Calendar: Some businesses want to be able to share the schedules for some or all of their services with their clients. You can now expose this calendar to your clients, integrate it with your website, and choose which services you want to display.
• Merge clients/pets: Bad data happens, sometimes clients forget what email address they used and create new profiles. Now you can merge those clients into one!

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That's it for this one!