Guide to availability in Tangram

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Summary:

Here’s a concise summary of the guide on scheduling in Tangram:

1. Overview:
   • Discusses three topics: availability systems, Google Calendar connection, and default ICS content in emails.
2. Availability Systems:
   • Availability can be tracked at the user or listing level:
     • User level: Availability is shared across all listings for a user.
     • Listing level: Availability is tracked individually per listing.
   • Configuring availability:
     • Use the availability page to define time intervals when users or listings can be booked.
     • Availability defaults to 24/7 but can be customized with recurring intervals or specific time slots.
3. Google Calendar Integration:
   • Steps to connect Google Calendar:
     • Go to GCal settings, log in, and complete the Google OAuth process.
     • Once connected, personal Google calendars (e.g., Birthdays) can be linked to sync their events with Tangram's availability system.
     • Enterprise users can set up a custom OAuth flow with assistance from Tangram.
4. Default ICS Content in Emails:
   • Booking confirmation emails include a Google Calendar widget and an ICS file attachment for event synchronization with external calendars.
5. Demo Flow:
   • Demonstrates creating a test booking, customizing availability, and using Google Calendar sync for a streamlined user experience.

For further assistance or feature requests, contact us at support@tangram.co

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Video Transcript:

" Hi, this is going to be a guide on how to look at scheduling in Tangram.  I'm going to go through number one, the availability systems that are available. Number two, I'm going to go through Google calendar connection processes. And then number three, I'm going to show the default ICS content sent in the Tangram emails, if you have availability enabled.

For the first thing, I'm going to just show you my configuration on this test platform I'm on.  I've created a new test platform. And I have some test listings and those listings under their scheduling settings have appointment set to as their scheduling type. What that means is a customer chooses a date and time when they book.

I'm going to go to listings and I'm going to start by creating a new transaction.

You won't have to type this URL in your app. It's just the route we use for creating bookings. But I'm going to create a test booking here and I'm going to put the date on someday in the future and select a time. We'll do 9am EST.

And I'm going to complete this booking with the test credit card from Stripe.

I'm going to pause the video and skip to the. important part.  I just completed that transaction. And now I'm on the receipt page. And as you can see, January EST, it says here.  That shows on the receipt page. Now, if I, I'm going to actually pause the video one more time and I'm going to go to my email and show you the receipt that I got as a customer booking.

I'm now in my email. And I've gone to the email that triggered with the default Tangram system for that booking. As you can see here at the top there's this little widget for Google calendar that says add to calendar because this listing, because this transaction had a date and time selector.

It's saying 9am at 10am the time we selected with the provider we booked with on January 23rd, which is all the details from our transaction. This is just the default transaction email. You can customize this to some extent. We have another video guide on that. We can, you can take a look at if you are interested.

But aside from that, at the bottom here, we have the ICS file. And if I download this it downloads the calendar event file to my devices calendar.  In this case, the Mac calendar app.  That's the receipt based ICS file flow. I'm going to pause the video one more time, and I'm going to now switch context over to the availability system and show you a little bit about how that works.

I'm back in the Tangram aap now. The way availability works at a high level is each listing type on your platform will have an availability level set on what that means is availability can be tracked either at the listing or user level.  If I go to this test listing type of my platform and I go to scheduling, it says here, what level should availability be tracked at?

And it sets a user right now.  What that means is if I go to a user. If I make a booking with the user on one of our listings, the availability events are tracked for all of the listings that user has.  For a more concrete example of that, if I make a booking with Rowan Sinclair on test listing number one, That availability is going to track on test listing number two as well, and vice versa.

And the same goes for all the providers in the platform. If you switch that setting to listing level availability, then the availability will be tracked at the individual listing level.  It won't be shared between listing one and two. The other part of that is both users and listings have calendars.

at the availability route.  There are a few ways to get to this route. It's slash availabilities and then the user's availability ID. Sometimes you'll, it'll be linked on the user's edit profile page. And for listings, it will be on the listings table. I can actually show you that quickly if I change the setting here.

I'll change this to listing level availability. And now if I go to a user's listing page if I manage listings for Avery Thompson, for example, I can see availability here in the dropdown. And if I go to this page, there are a few settings here that are important that I'm going to talk about.

This range you see here by default, this is the range during which Avery is available. And right now it's just set to 12 a. m. to 12 p. m. To 12 a. m. every day. If you want to change that, the way that it works is you can add new what, what are called available intervals. If you're, this is mostly if you're not using Google calendar.

But you add a new available interval. You select a day and time for like that availability. Let's say I want to do like January 7th to 8th, I'm booked. And then you can set it to recur if you want.  You can say instead of January 7th and 8th, in this case, it would, if I set it to weekly, it would be like the 14th, 15th, 21st, 22nd, et cetera, forever.

And you can set that daily, weekly, monthly level of recurrence.  That's how you, like, create intervals during which users can book. And you can delete the existing ones, too. Like, if I delete the default one, now Avery can't be booked at any time. And what I'll do here, for the sake of example, is I'll just make her available from 9 a.

m. 9 a. m. to 9 p. m. every week. , January 6th to January 10th. Oops. January 6th to January 10th. Actually, sorry, I have to January 6th, 9am to January 6th 5pm.

Okay, I did 9 to 9, whatever. We'll save that. I did not make it recur. Sorry, I'm gonna do that one more time. January 6th, 9am to January 6th, 9pm. And then we'll make that recur weekly. And now every Monday Avery's available from 9 to 9. And then you would just create that for all the days you wanted. To be available on that user.

By default, if users don't modify this, they'll just be available 24 7. But if they want to refine their availability or you wanna refine it for them, you can from this menu.  The second important thing about about availability on this page is Google Calendar. Google Calendar flow is going to require me to go to a live platform because you can't use Google Calendar while you're in test mode.

It. I'll just pause and I'll be right back. Okay, so now I'm on a new platform. This one's in live mode. And what that's going to allow me to do is go through the full Google calendar connection process.  The way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to go to G cal settings and click connect Google calendar.

And when I get to that page when I get to, when I click that button, it's going to tell me to please sign in again to the platform. If you have a custom login page, it will show that instead. But you have to log in here and once you do so, you get brought directly to the Google OAuth flow.  I'm going to go into my Google account and hit continue.

It says Tangram here, and unfortunately we can't change that. Google strictly, excuse me, Google strictly regulates who can get access to this flow.  If you're on an enterprise plan, you actually. You can create like a, a Google OAuth flow within your Google OAuth account, and we can work with you on that, but that availability, if you want to use the Tangram version of it, it has to be done through the Tangram Google account, unless you're on an enterprise plan.

And there's no way around that, unfortunately. Because it requires like a full application instance to be set up. And your own like hosting resources to be self managed. But I'm going to click allow here. And then I get directed and it says your calendar has been connected. You can close this tab.

Now if I go back to Tangram and I refresh here, it says when I click the Google calendar settings button again it indicates the Google calendar has been connected to this Google account. And what I can do from here is connect any of my personal calendars from Google by clicking the add calendar button.

What that means is in my Google account, for example, I have a calendar called birthdays. If I say, if I connect the birthdays calendar, then now all of the times from the birthday calendar will be accounted for in the availability system in Tangram. And as you can see, it indicates that here in the table, you can connect as many calendars as you want from your Google account.

And they'll just automatically sync with the Tangerine map going forward from there.  That's the, that's a brief overview of pretty much everything availability related in the Tangerine map. If you have any questions about any of this please let one of our team members know. If you have requests for like functionality, you can let us know as well.

We're happy to like take that into account as we continue to develop our roadmap on this. We do also have a lot of updates coming out regarding this relatively soon.  We'll update as those get live, we'll update this video. But otherwise that's pretty much it. Hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll catch you all later."

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