RECURRING BOOKINGS
What recurring bookings are, when they can be beneficial, and how you can effectively utilize them using Teamdeck
What is Recurring Booking?
Recurring Booking refers to repeatedly scheduling the same event, task, or resource allocation at regular intervals without manually entering each instance. This can be daily, weekly, monthly, or predefined frequency. It benefits businesses and teams with consistent, repeating workflows or events requiring regular scheduling.
When to Use Recurring Booking
Weekly Team Meetings: If your team meets every Monday to discuss weekly goals and progress, setting up a recurring booking ensures the meeting is automatically scheduled without needing manual input each week.
Regular Resource Allocation: For companies that allocate resources like equipment, rooms, or staff regularly (e.g., a training room booked every Friday for onboarding sessions), recurring bookings streamline the process.
Routine Maintenance Tasks: Businesses that perform regular maintenance tasks (e.g., the IT system checks every month) can use recurring bookings to ensure these tasks are not overlooked.
Add recurring booking
To add a recurring booking, follow the steps outlined in the Add Booking Information section in the Manage Your Team's Schedule article. You can specify the recurrence pattern to set it up according to your needs.
Frequency Selection: choose the frequency of your recurring booking. You can select options like Every day, Every week on the detected day of the week, Every month on the detected day of the month, or create a custom schedule. If you choose Custom from the list, as shown in the second screenshot, you can specify the custom repeating pattern.
End of Recurrence: You can stop after a specific date or a certain number of occurrences.
Notes
Dependency on Skipping Options: When setting up or editing recurring bookings in Teamdeck.io, the system allows users to skip weekends, approved vacations, and bank holidays automatically. This means long bookings will only be scheduled on working days, ensuring recurring events do not overlap with non-working days. Events that occur on non-working days will be skipped.
Lack of Total Hours information: Teamdeck does not allow users to define recurring bookings based on the Total Hours field, requiring users to manually calculate and set the duration for each recurring event rather than simply specifying a total number of hours.
Edit recurring booking
Navigate to the calendar where your recurring booking is scheduled, locate the specific booking you want to edit, and click on it to open a drawer on the right side of your screen containing the edit form. You can modify the Recurring Rule or other information. After making your desired changes, you will be presented with three options to apply your edits:
This Booking: Select this option to apply the changes only to the specific occurrence of the booking you clicked on.
All Future Bookings: Choose this option if you want the changes to apply to the current booking and all future occurrences in the series, leaving past bookings unchanged.
All Bookings: Use this option to apply the changes to all occurrences in the entire series, including past and future bookings
Drag & drop or Resize the calendar block. The changes apply only to the event you moved or resized, leaving the rest of the series unaffected. After repositioning the booking, a confirmation popup will appear, allowing you to review and confirm the changes before they are applied.
Notes
Add to timesheet: Clicking "Add to Timesheet" from the booking tooltip creates a time entry based on the specific booking you selected and not the whole sequence.
Limitation in Multi-Select Feature: Currently, Teamdeck does not support selecting recurring bookings when using the multi-select feature, which means users must individually click and edit recurring bookings separately.
Additional information
Teamdeck's REST API returns recurring booking rules in the RRule (Recurrence Rule) standard format. This widely-used format specifies the recurrence pattern of events, allowing users to quickly understand and integrate recurring schedules with other systems that support RRule. Using the RRule standard, Teamdeck ensures compatibility and consistency in managing recurring bookings across different platforms.