Events and classes in practice

MakePlans supports two kinds of bookings: appointment booking (services), where the customer picks a free time within your opening hours, and events, which happen at a fixed date and time and can take multiple attendees, such as a yoga class, a seminar or a course. This article covers common event setups.

The building blocks

To offer events you need three things:

A resource. This is what gets booked. For events you usually only need one; name it "Event" or similar. You only need more resources if you have to manage availability separately, for example different rooms, to avoid double-booking.
An event type. Think of this as a category, such as "Yoga" or "Beginner course". It is not the actual event; it groups your events in one list on the booking site.
The events themselves. Create these from the calendar or agenda. Each event has a date, start and end time and a maximum number of participants.

A weekly class that repeats

When you create an event you can set it to repeat; the recurring options are right under the start and end dates in the form. Choose a weekly pattern and limit it either by an end date or by a number of occurrences. For a class every Tuesday for two months, create the first event and repeat it weekly until your end date.

Two things to know:

Recurrence must be set when you create the event. You cannot make an existing event recurring afterwards, and you cannot change the recurring pattern later, but you can edit or delete each individual event in the series.
Attendees sign up for each event individually. There is no way for a customer to sign up for all events in a recurring series in one booking.

A multi-session course booked as one unit

If your course runs over, say, 8 weeks and attendees should sign up once for the whole thing, create one event with a start date and an end date spanning the full course period. The customer then makes a single booking. The trade-off is that you cannot manage each individual session separately; it is one event in the system.

Attendee limits

Set the maximum number of participants on each event. When the limit is reached the event is full and no more signups are possible. If a customer books for more than one person, the price is multiplied by the number of people (a booking for 3 people at 200 is 600).

Waiting lists

Events support a waitlist. When the waitlist is enabled and an event is fully booked, customers can join the waitlist from the booking site instead of being turned away, and they are notified when a spot becomes available. Waitlisted attendees are shown on the event page in the administration system. The waitlist can be enabled for your whole account or per event type.

Different prices for adults, children or members

MakePlans has one fixed price per service or event type; there is no built-in support for multiple price levels or ticket types. There are two ways to handle it:

Create one event type (or service) per price group, each with its own price, for example "Course - adult", "Course - child", "Course - member". The system cannot verify who is actually a member or a child; if that matters, add a custom field (such as a membership number) and check bookings manually. If the groups share limited capacity, you must also manage availability between the separate events manually.
Use discount codes. Under Setup > Discount codes you can create codes, for example a member code that gives a reduced price at prepayment. The code used is shown on the booking and included in exports.

If you only need to know the ticket type and the price is the same, a custom field in the booking form (for example a dropdown) is simpler than separate event types, but you cannot limit capacity per ticket type that way.

Free events

You do not have to charge for events. To make an event free, simply leave the price field empty. Entering 0 gives the error "price must be greater than 0"; an empty field is the intended way, and no price will be shown on the booking site. There are no MakePlans transaction fees for free events.