Why Choose Us?

Many booking systems support time-based bookings,

Example :-
A user wants to book a room between 9:00 & 9:30.

SchoolBooking supports this, but we also give you the additional ability to create pre-defined timeslots to match your School day - e.g. I want to book the Computer Room Lessons 1.

This makes it much easier for your staff to quickly make bookings for general lesson bookings but with the flexibility of being able to use time based bookings on meeting rooms and other bookings that may not match the school day.

Most booking systems treat bookable items in same way as one another on a bookable grid i.e. you can book them between x and x time. SchoolBooking allows you specify different timeslots on each room or resource individually.

An Example of this is :-
The Main hall could allow bookings every morning but only between 8:30 and 9:10.
The minibus could be booked after school or anytime on weekends.
The IT room can be booked on a lesson by lesson basis and all day on training days.
The meeting room can be booked between 8:00 and 17:00 but in 15 minute slots.

You can also specify these plans on a daily basis per item, so the main hall could have a completely different set of booking rules on a Monday compared to a Tuesday in two weeks time or every third Thursday. This is a very powerful feature beyond the scope of most other booking systems.

To ensure that rooms cannot be booked at times when they are unavailable or already in use, SchoolBooking can synchronise with your School Management Information System (MIS) to check when Lessons, Cover, Room Closures, and Holidays apply.

Unlike other systems that only allow for an automatic overnight synchronisation, SchoolBooking also includes the option for ‘Anytime Synching’. This avoids the potential flaw of your room availability being up to 24 hours out of date.

Example: If your cover/timetable manager makes a change in your MIS early in the morning, rather than having to wait until the following day for those changes to show, SchoolBooking can see them within minutes.

Additionally, the cover manager can initiate the new sync themselves via a simple double-click of a desktop shortcut – avoiding the need to even i) login to the booking system, ii) involve a tech/administrator.

We care what our customers say. Below are the results from our 2015 review...

How easy was SchoolBooking to setup - 8.41 / 10

How user friendly is SchoolBooking - 8.44 / 10

How good is our online help - 8.05 / 10

Do we meet your requirements - 8.63 / 10

Rate our customer service - 9.38 / 10

Rate our technical support - 9.11 / 10

Giving SchoolBooking an Overall score - 9.05 / 10

We are continuously working on new features and improvements, and these reviews form a key part of our development plan. We hope this will be reflected in the scores for the 2016 reviews.

The answer is probably not. That is why SchoolBooking includes several optional settings that determine what items a specific user is able to book and when.

Examples:
Is the user allowed to book the room/resource themselves?
How far ahead can they log a new booking?
How much notice do they have to give before making a booking?
How many bookings are they are allowed to record in a given time?

Other booking systems include basic permissions on user accounts, but we like to think we have gone one step further by enabling permissions dependant on the room and resource too. This means, for example, you could give your teaching staff the ability to book most rooms up to four weeks ahead and your office staff up to six weeks ahead – except for the main hall which has a limit of two weeks regardless of whether they are teaching/office staff.

In most cases it is the system that manages which rooms/resources your staff can and cannot book. Meanwhile, the reports area within SchoolBooking can be used for monitoring purposes. However, there may be bookings involving a specific item, or sometimes even a specific user, where certain members of staff need to be alerted.
If supervision applies, the booking is given a temporary status of ‘Pending’ (the user is alerted of this before they confirm the booking).
Example: If the Main Hall is booked by a member of staff, the site manager may need to be made aware of this immediately.

In this example, all that is required is to add the site manager to the Main Hall’s ‘Email Notification’ setting. All new booking activity for that room (including cancellations and adjustments) will then be sent to the site manager as soon as it occurs. Where required, this can be taken one step further and the booking require authorisation before it can be treated as finalised. If set, the user will be warned that their booking will initially be given the status of ‘pending – requiring authorisation’. Meanwhile, the site manager’s email will include a link where they can quickly OK or Reject the booking.

Should you have resources that, when not in use, are stored in a specific location, the optional Resource Tracker keeps an extra eye on them to ensure that their current whereabouts is always known.

Example of use:
i) The User books a set of iPads.
ii) On the day of the booking, they collect those iPads from the IT department (or IT bring it to them).
iii) A member of the IT Team clicks a single button on the Tracker page to show that they have been collected.
iv) When the iPads are returned, a second button is clicked to log this.
This simple two-click process means that the iPads will have a record of where they currently are, where they’ve been, and when they’re due for another collection/return.

Why stick with the blue bar or standard login page? SchoolBooking provides two modules dedicated to customising the look of your SchoolBooking site.

The Login customiser allows you to create your own unique login page for your users and the theme editor allows you to adjust the colours and logo that your users will see once logged in.

The Lettings System works in much the same way as the Booking System with the following key exceptions....

i) Potential hirer’s have access to a customisable webpage outside of SchoolBooking (known as the StoreFront) to showcase your Facilities and to make them aware of the available times/costs.
ii) Each Facility can be set to enable just a single reservation per slot, or multiple reservations (example: your sports hall may be large enough to accommodate several hirers at one time).
ii) Fees can be set so that different charges apply depending on the hirer, the facility, the date, the times, and the length of the reservation.
iv) If required, an invoicing/payment module is included to keep a record of the financial records for each hirer account. The Lettings and Booking Systems integrate seamlessly with one another so that a reservation made in one system will show on the other (e.g. users of the Booking System will be unable to book a slot if it has been reserved by a hirer – and vice-versa).

SchoolBooking includes separate user accounts for each member of staff. These accounts can be created manually from within the system or automatically by making use of a direct connection with your school network’s Active Directory.
LDAP
If enabled, users not already known to SchooBooking are automatically given an account with the same username/password as their network credentials. Where required, rules can be defined to accept just a particular type of school user (e.g. teaching and office staff).

SSO
If enabled, this also bypasses the requirement for the user to manually login to SchoolBooking (in school only). The credentials of the account currently logged in on the pc will be used for an automatic login.