BookingBug Blog: News and updates from the BookingBug team

Apr 17

Planned system maintenance this weekend

As you know our development team is tasked with continually improving the BookingBug platform to ensure it remains the best possible solution for online scheduling. Often this means small tweaks behind the scenes and occasionally it means much bigger system-wide technology upgrades.

This weekend our tech team will be be rolling out a major system upgrade to BookingBug that means we’ll be faster and slicker. It includes a series of refinements, and most importantly will form the foundation of a host of advanced new features that we’ll be rolling out throughout this year and beyond.

Due to the core nature of this system upgrade there may be a limited period of downtime as we roll out these changes. Depending on your timezone, we expect any potential downtime to last less than an hour between:

  • UK: 06:00-07:00 BST (Saturday 20th April)
  • US: 01:00-02:00 EDT (Saturday 20th April) / 22:00-23:00 PDT (Friday 19th April)
  • AUS: 16:00-17:00 AEST (Saturday 20th April)

Our tech team will be working hard to ensure this system upgrade will happen as quickly and smoothly as possible without any interruption to either your business or your customers, however if you have any specific questions you can contact our support team at support@bookingbug.com.

Best wishes – and thanks in advance for your patience,
The BookingBug Team

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Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
Mar 08

Take card payments on the move with BookingBug & iZettle

mobile payment with BookingBugWe are delighted to announce our partnership with European social payments provider iZettle to enable BookingBug users to securely take card payments on the move through an iPhone or iPad.

iZettle’s mobile card reader is a great way to take customer payments in person from wherever you are through your mobile device. It is particularly ideal for mobile or non-office-based businesses such as mobile therapists, driving instructors, plumbers, personal trainers etc. who want to be able to to accept card payment during an appointment.

All you need is an iZettle account (they’ll provide you with the card reading device to plug into your iPhone / iPad) and the latest version of the BookingBug iOS mobile app and you’re ready to go!

There’s more information explaining the step-by-step set-up process through BookingBug here, and an in-depth Q&A from iZettle answering any more in-depth questions you may have.

iZettle payments are currently available to BookingBug users Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, UK, Germany and Spain. More countries will be coming soon, as will iZettle’s integration into BookingBug’s Android application.

If you have any questions, or would like to talk about how your business can start taking mobile payments with iZettle, simply drop our support team a line at support@bookingbug.com.

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Friday, March 8th, 2013
Feb 25

More changes and updates to the BookingBug mobile app

BookingBug online scheduling apps

Since releasing our all-new beta mobile apps for iOS and Android earlier this month, our development team has been busy working through your feedback to continue making improvements and adding new features as suggested by our users. We’re pleased to announce that the first in a series of updates is now available for download from the App Store (iPhone / iPad) and Play Store (Android).

 

The update now available now includes:

  • Create a new client record while creating a new booking
  • Display your booking notes
  • Display blocked out days
  • Switch on the 24 Clock setting option
  • Sort client by either first name or last name
  • A specific fix for Galaxy S2 users
  • A number of other small fixes and improvements

If you’re already using BookingBug mobile you’ll simply need to update the app on your device to to benefit from these new features. If you don’t yet have the app and want to begin managing your bookings on the move you can download the iPhone and iPad version here, and the Android version here.

We’re continuing to improve and add new features to our mobile offering on a rolling basis so if there’s something you’d like to see that’s not currently available, please do let us know. And as always, if you have any questions, just give our support team a shout at support@bookingbug.com.

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Monday, February 25th, 2013
Feb 08

Announcing our new mobile apps for iPhone, iPad & Android devices

Online scheduling mobile app

Here at BookingBug HQ we’ve made it our mission to ensure we provide our users with the most advanced, easy-to-use booking, scheduling and appointment platform available. We know our users want to be able to use BookingBug on the move, from any mobile device, through your browser or via a dedicated app – so following lots of valuable feedback (thank you!) we’ve been working hard on a complete overhaul of our iOS and Android mobile apps.

So what’s new?

In essence, the whole entire application is new. We scrapped the old one and started again. So here goes – welcome to the completely new and improved BookingBug app with a host of new features, including:

  • New user friendly design
  • Ability to create new bookings
  • Ability to add new clients
  • View your client list and client information
  • Day calendar view
  • Email, phone and map links
  • Mark unpaid bookings as paid
  • Answers to booking questions included with booking details
  • Push notification for new bookings

We need your feedback!

This is the first version of our new iOS and Android app. We’ll be continuing to add new features and functionality on a rolling basis based on our users’ feedback and suggestions. It’s your feedback that will determine what our technical team will focus on building next so once you’ve had a play with the app please do head on over to our Community Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

We hope you like the new apps – and await your feedback!

 

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Friday, February 8th, 2013
Jan 29

Introducing the new BookingBug configure page

This week we’ve launched a brand new “configure” page – the place within your BookingBug account where you can set-up and make changes to your business’s settings – to make it easier than ever to navigate through the system and manage your bookings online.

Now, rather than using the (frankly quite long and sometimes confusing) sidebar of settings options, we have introduced a simple new settings page.

When you log into your account and click “configure” you’ll now see an option (on the bottom left of your screen) to take you through to the new look “settings” page. When you click “try it out” you see all the options for configuring your BookingBug account are now displayed in a series of at-a-glance boxes, with concise descriptions of what each setting does in your account.

Online scheduling software

And don’t worry if you’d like time to familiarize yourself with the new layout, all our existing users will have the option to switch between the old and new versions for the next few weeks.

The team here at BookingBug HQ is constantly listening to our user feedback and working on ways that we can improve the BookingBug experience for businesses and your customers or clients. These changes are part of an on-going project to make BookingBug as simple as possible to set-up and manage, so if you have any feedback on this, or any other parts of the system, then do head on over to our user feedback forum and tell us about it.

Keep the comments coming!

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Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
Jan 03

It’s time to take the leap, entrepreneurship beckons!

Start your own business with BookingBugHappy New Year from the team here at BookingBug HQ!

So what’s your New Year’s resolution? Exercise more, drink less, spend more time with loved ones, cut out the carbs? Or, is 2013 the year you’re finally going to make that leap into entrepreneurship and start your own business?

If the answer is yes (to the last one at least..) then great – you’ve already done the hardest bit – making the exciting decision to finally do it.

So now let BookingBug help…

If you’re planning to start a service business (whether that be beauty, fitness, plumbing, tutoring, a B&B, bicycle repairs – or anything in between) two of the biggest challenges you will face in the early months are keeping costs down, and minimising the admin to ensure you can focus as much time as possible doing what you enjoy – the main reason you decided to go it alone in the first place, right?

Tools such as BookingBug can help support you on both these fronts. For example an online booking system can remove the need to hire extra admin support by letting your customers or clients view availability and schedule their own appointments. Automated email and SMS confirmations and reminders can remove lots of manual admin, and online payments can be a godsend when it comes to minimising no-shows.

Looking at the bigger picture customer acquisition and retention are key in the early months and beyond. BookingBug’s add-on marketing tools can help you develop and manage your online and mobile marketing campaigns, while our clever analysis tools can help you review your booking, client and business data to get a detailed feel for how your business is performing. Not to mention how a customised booking widget with slick user experience can help give your website a professional looking edge of course.

And it’s been built for your business. BookingBug has been developed from the ground-up to be light, flexible and simple to manage. Which means it is very reasonably priced for new businesses just starting out (from just $19.95 / £14.95 per month), easy to set-up and get to grips with, and built to scale with you as you business grows.

So happy New Year – start as you mean to go on and sign-up for a free BookingBug trial today!

One final thing – there’s lots of great advice out there on going it alone so first things first, do your research. To get you started, we like the broad range of helpful articles on Entrepreneur.com, this handy start-up guide from Sage and this round-up of tips from BBC Business… Let us know what other useful resources you come across out there and we’ll share them with the BookingBug community.

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Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
Nov 26

Scheduled summary emails direct to your inbox

You may remember that we recently announced the launch of BookingBug Insights, our suite of powerful real-time data analysis tools to make it easier than ever for you to analyse and make the most of your customer data? Well today we’re launching an additional feature within Insights; the ability to choose to receive scheduled emails containing useful information about your business.

There are three types of scheduled summary email that you can choose to receive:

1)   All upcoming bookings for today: Great for businesses looking for a handy daily at-a-glance overview of all bookings and customer info for the day ahead.

A daily summary of your bookings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2)   All upcoming bookings for the week ahead: Great for businesses that would like an overview email summarizing all bookings and related information scheduled for the next seven days.

A weekly email update with the coming week's bookings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3)   A summary of last week’s bookings including the number of bookings and revenue generated: Great if you’d like a weekly update on bookings and revenue to use as part of your regular business performance monitoring.

a weekly email summarising the past week's activity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To enable email summary reports within your BookingBug account you simply need to go to Calendar > Insights and then select Scheduled Reports and choose which you would like to receive.

They will be sent to the email address configured under Account > Settings > Notifications > Basic Settings. The emails will be sent overnight daily (or on Monday morning for the weekly reports).

Don’t forget, this is just the first iteration of BookingBug Insights features, so head on over to our Community Feedback Forum to let us know what else you’d like to see as our reporting and analysis tools continue to evolve.

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Monday, November 26th, 2012
Nov 20

Changing the wording in BookingBug to match your business terminology

Flexible online scheduling softwareHi all – today we’re launching a brand new feature within BookingBug, the ability for you to change the wording and terminology within the widget and across the site to suit your business type or industry.

It’s something we’ve had many requests for through our BookingBug Community Feedback Forum, so we are really please to be able to now offer all BookingBug users this extra level of customization.

You can find the setting to change the wording within your account in: Accounts > Settings > Terminology.

Here you’ll see where you can change the basic words in your account (Common Translations) and a whole series of other words and phrases that appear through the booking process that you might want to tailor to better suit the kind of terminology used day-to-day in your industry.

Just select the set phrases you would like to change, type in your preferred wording and hit update. That’s all there is to it.

For example:

  • A B&B may want to change days to nights
  • A beauty salon may want to change person to therapist
  • If you’re selling gift certificates, you may wish to change click here if you are not the attendee to is this experience a gift for someone else?
  • A sports centre may want to change resource to tennis court

You get the picture…

Essentially, we want to make the booking experience for your customers as smooth and simple as possible – and at the core of that is communication, and giving you the flexibility to use the terms and phrases that you, your staff and your customers are most comfortable with.

It’s also worth nothing that this is just our first iteration of this terminology tool – so if there’s any additional words or phrases that you can’t see within this list that you would like to be able to customize, just let us know and we will get them added to the system.

That’s all for now!

Team BookingBug.

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Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
Nov 13

Lots of lovely new options for printing your calendars

As you know, we recently launched our BookingBug Community Feedback Forum where our users can submit their ideas for new features, changes and integrations. The community can then vote on which ideas they’d like to see built and rolled out – the more votes it gets, the higher up our list of priorities it goes.

It’s a great way for us to ensure we’re developing BookingBug in a way that is as useful as possible. After all, there’s no point in us devoting our development team to projects that no one is interested in using!

We’ll be keeping you updated as your ideas are built and launched – and today we’d like to introduce you to our new suite of calendar printing options. This has been our highest voted suggestion, with 45 votes over the past couple of months.

BookingBug allows printing of your upcoming bookings for staff members and resources. You can now have a summary list of bookings for a chosen group, or a more detailed look of your bookings. Bookings can be printed for the day as well as the week for any staff or resource.

First go to your dashboard and select either the people or resources tab on the left. Then on the right-hand side of the dashboard click the settings button displayed by the green cog, and click print bookings.

Print your calendar for the day or week

If you are viewing a certain staff member or resource in your dashboard, you’ll have the options to print bookings for any day of that week as well as print a week’s worth of bookings in a summary view or calendar view similar to your dashboard.

When viewing all resources or people in the dashboard, you can choose to print by a particular person, resource or print all bookings, which will group the bookings for staff members in chronological order.

For more information you can visit the BookingBug Knowledge Base to find out how to make the most of the new print settings available to you.

Please note this currently only applies for businesses with staff members and resources. If you are running an event based business you can choose to print off an attendees list for any of your events.

 

Let us know what you think!

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Tuesday, November 13th, 2012
Nov 12

Announcing Our New WordPress Plug-in: Version 2.2

No matter what your business type, BookingBug is the perfect tool for managing schedules or appointments on an hour, day or week basis, or for running classes, courses or events. And that’s why this week we’re very excited to be announcing our new WordPress plugin, making it easier than ever for you to add a completely customized booking widget to any WordPress site.

BookingBug 2.2 for WordPress now gives you a customizable WordPress short code, giving you endless, advanced options when it comes to size, style, colour and design of a booking widget on your WordPress site, blog or post.

And adding a BookingBug widget to your WordPress site couldn’t be simpler…

Downloading the plugin:

Visit WordPress.com, log in and head to your site. In the left hand column click Add New under Plugins. Search for BookingBug and click Install Now under BookingBug Booking Calendar Widget.

Once the install is complete, Click Activate Plugin.

Your BookingBug short code:

Once you have downloaded the BookingBug WordPress plugin you will need to enter your booking widget shortcode – which we generate for you.

Online scheduling for WordPress

Log into your BookingBug account and head to Publish. Click on Customize Widgets on the left and side. Below “Script to Copy for Specific Widget” you’ll see an icon called Show WordPress Shortcode. Click here to see the snippet of code you need to copy into the body of your WordPress page / post.

Online appointment booking widget for wordpress

Here in Customize Widgets you can easily customize the short code to fit the look and feel of your WordPress site – or even generate code to show just specific services, staff or resources if you want to show different booking widgets on different pages.

And if you have a Facebook page – why not add your widget as an app to that too? It only takes a couple of minutes and give you a whole other channel to promote your business and take bookings online.

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Monday, November 12th, 2012