Taking bookings

The Bookings screen is a grid: courts across, the day’s hours down. A block is a booking; a gap is free. Shared lanes show occupancy — 3/8 — instead of blocks. Closures and maintenance appear as blocked time so a court never looks free when it is not.

The grid is a view of the real bookings, not a copy. When two people try to book the same slot at the same second, the database lets exactly one through, and the other sees a clear refusal. There is no cache to go stale and no second calendar to disagree.

Cancelled and no-show bookings are absent from the grid, because cancelling genuinely frees the court.

1. 1Press New booking, or tap a free slot on the grid.
2. 2Pick the court and the time. The slot length comes from the sport’s defaults.
3. 3Find the customer by name or phone. A walk-in who is not on file yet is added right here — type the name, choose “add as new customer”, done. The front desk never has to leave the booking to create a person.
4. 4Read the price. It is worked out from the rate card for this customer — member or not, weekday or weekend, peak or not — and it is the price that will be charged.
5. 5Confirm. An invoice is raised with the quoted price frozen on it, and a payment can be taken now or later.

If the customer holds a session pack for this sport, the pack pays first: no invoice is raised, the booking shows “paid by session pack”, and one session is used. A pack for one sport never pays for another sport’s court.

A booking has one payer — the customer on it — and can carry a list of players who joined. Players are contacts, not bills: they are never invoiced, never priced, and take no seat. The point is that the club keeps the phone numbers of everyone who plays here, so “who does this person play with” has an answer in both directions.

• Held — reserved for a moment while details are entered.
• Confirmed — booked and priced.
• Checked in — they arrived.
• Completed — the session happened.
• Cancelled — released; the slot is free again.
• No-show — released too, but remembered as a no-show.
• Blocked — a closure, a maintenance job or a coaching session holding the court.

Cancel from the booking. If the rate card has a cut-off and a fee, the desk shows the fee before you confirm the cancellation — free outside the cut-off, the percentage inside it. If a pack paid for the booking, cancelling gives the session back.

Money that has to go back to a customer never leaves against the invoice directly. A credit note is raised first, then a refund against it, and the refund is capped by what was actually paid. The Money chapter explains why; the desk just walks you through it.

“Every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 for the next twelve weeks” is one form. FrontCourt creates ordinary bookings, one per date, each priced at its own date and cancellable on its own. If one Tuesday is already taken, that date is skipped and named; the other eleven weeks go through.

When the slot someone wants is taken, put them on the waitlist for it. A waitlist entry holds nothing and blocks nobody. When the slot frees — a cancellation — the first person in the queue is offered it, with a deadline; nobody else is offered it while that offer stands. If they let it lapse, the next person is offered.

You cannot join a waitlist for a slot that is free. That is a booking.

Next: Customers, households and the portal →