Improved Events System

[BathTCG]

Hi,

Within my business I run a lot of events. Some are paid, some are free, some are one offs and others are recurring.

One of the features that I feel the Square Online system is missing (personally at least) is a robust events system. The current is doable, but it's very arduous with having to re-create multiple events each week that are recurring. There is also no monthly calendar view available either.

A system that has a daily, weekly and monthly view with RSVP, Paid and Recurring events would be brilliant. An added bonus would be the option to add custom fields to the events e.g. Unique Player ID, Date of Birth etc.

Look forward to hearing back and seeing what plans are in the timeline.

[Sineaid]

Hi @BathTCG,

Thanks for reaching out to let us know what would be beneficial to your business. The additional context will be beneficial to our product development team when they next come to view Seller feedback and suggestions.

I understand that the limitation on the Point of Sale that only allows for a weekly view could indeed be a pain point. However, you can actually access a monthly view from your Square Appointments Dashboard. You’ll find the Range filter from your Calendar tab, where you can switch between: Day, Week, 5-Day or Month views.

It is also possible within Square Appointments to schedule and manage recurring appointments from both your Dashboard and the Appointments app.

From your Square Appointments calendar.

1. Click Create Appointment.
2. Enter client details and appointment information.
3. Under Appointment Details, tick Repeat.
4. Set the repeating schedule.
5. Click Save.

With regards to custom fields, if you subscribe to Square Appointments Plus or Premium you can now use customer profile fields to collect custom information from your customers. DoB and Address are the default fields for data collection, and you can learn more about creating additional custom fields, here.

I hope you find the information and links above useful, and I’ll be sure to circle back to this thread if I hear of anything in the pipeline that would further improve your experience. 

[AnnaBYLY]

We would also like more attention/tweaks to the events/classes options

I also find the events system clunky but the classes option in the appointment system doesn’t work for what we need either. Neither quite fits, and I know there are systems that do all the things that we need but I’m just about sticking with Square for the ease of having all our customer management in one place. 

Main issues:

events can’t be reoccurring / but classes don’t have an option to run in blocks or terms and unless you set up the first week and just manually block out the time slots on the calendar for the next however many weeks you can still get appointment requests for the timeslot the staff member is teaching the class. This is really annoying if you’re running multiple classes each week and have multiple staff members. 

neither events or classes can have an automated contract go out, even though appointments can, so this is clearly something which should be possible to work out

I can’t easily view a list of people (and their contact info) who have booked a event without having to get into searching transactions or downloading things.

I can’t quickly send out pre/post event emails to the booked people without that info. 

I can easily highlight events or services on the website but not classes. So classes don’t work for a bigger event you really want to promote lots because people have to be walked through the booking process.

I can sell bundles of events and items, which is great for things that might need equipment. I can sell packages of services and classes which is also great. But I can’t sell a package that has an event or an item. Or a bundle that includes a free class or a massage. Having this all joined up so I could offer things like:

- an antenatal course (currently event)

- 10 pregnancy yoga sessions (currently classes) 

- a full body pregnancy massage (service)

as a single transaction would be great. This also stops me wanting to move more events over to classes as I couldn’t add a sling to a babywearing workshop or a optional swim nappy to a water based course. 

And if I could attach the health check contract to selected online transactions the way I can for appointments that would simplify my life massively. 

thanks! 

[AnnaBYLY]

Oh. And the option to sort events by date in the item library when you’ve filtered it to view events only would be useful! 

[AnnaBYLY]

And for review requests for events/appointments/classes to go out after the date they happen on, rather than a set time after booking. A 2 week delay works well for items - but if you have people booking events for March next year it’s no use at all. 

[BathTCG]

Hi @Sineaid ,

Thank you for your feedback. We did explore the appointments system a little while back but sadly that wasn't fit for our purpose either.

The "Classes" section of it looked great but the system overall is more targeted at hairdressers/beauty salons/physio appointments etc. The main page would list all of the "treatments" but to get to classes you had to jump through multiple hoops and it wasn't the most friendly option.

To give an idea of what we have done please take a look at https://bathtcg.co.uk/bath-tcg-events

We have created "Event" items in the dashboard and added all the details, we then have to selected "Featured Events" this would be better if we could just add the "Events" category to the page which sorts the items into date order.

Below that we have integrated an events calendar, we have to manually populate this, so having a calendar built into square that can feed off our event data would be great, plus it could hopefully be a bit more adaptable and user friendly, especially for those on mobile phones.

Hope that helps with what we require.

Thanks,

Ben