Doing Signups and Managing Them

You should also check out the help regarding users signing themselves up.

Signing Someone Up

Clicking on a Request This or an Apply for This creates a signup request. All other button labels (including Book Time) result in the signup being completed immediately, unless waitlisting applies.

Now enter who you want to signup, fill in the desired form fields if any, and confirm the form. Normally this just means clicking on the OK button. But if booking a time, there is a little more to it. This is because a booking consumes part of a sliceable activity and because you may need to choose a new service. For more on booking a service, click here).

As you enter a name to signup, matching registered people are shown (even if what you started to type was an email address). But if you are not sure you have identified the intended person, doing Search People Database might help. Conversely if the No Matches message is displayed, you can do the Register right then and there by clicking on its here link.

Unless an activity's type is Reservation or Sliceable Activity, you may over-assign people to it. For example, you might want to do this when someone "walks in" during the event and offers to help out. (Alternately, you could increase the number of spots a schedule item has by clicking on its time).

Note: In the grid and calendar layouts, the command labels are shorter. For example, "Signup for This" shrinks to "Signup".

Signup Lines

If your schedule view shows signups or you click a zoom checkbox, you can view and manipulate each such signup via its signup line. Similarly to see all signups of a person together, select Status menu->Show Signups or enter a person's name or email address into the Show One Person's Signups dynamic menu.

You can also see everyone's signups together at once, via the Signups per Person page.

A Signup Line's Links

• Click on the person's name to bring up the person's registration info.
• If the activity has a signup form, the line will contain a . Click on it to bring up the form.
• Click on the line's to cancel the signup. If you setup an auto-message for this action, it will be triggered. If the signup is unapproved, your Disapproval Notification message applies. Otherwise your Confirm Signup Cancelled message applies.
• If the person has an email address, the line will contain: Email. Click on it to do an ad hoc Send to that person.
  • For the link to work, your email program must be the default email program on your system. If it is not, search for 'your-program default email' in your search engine — replacing your-program with Outlook, Gmail, Thunderbird, or whatever.
  • This link has nothing to do with the confirmation and notification messages that can be setup. To change those, click on Setup Auto-Messages in the top-of-page menus.

Note: In the grid and calendar layouts, the links have been merged into the status menu. For example, the EMAIL icon becomes the SEND EMAIL menu item. Also the person's name is always the current item of the menu, and you bring up the person's registration form by selecting the REGISTRATION INFO item in the menu.

A Signup Line's Status Menu

A signup's status enables you to keep track of unapproved requests, planning progress, and on-site attendance. You can click on a signup's Status dropdown menu to change its status. Or as described below, you can use this menu to initiate a move/reassign or a multi-signup action.

For the most part, a status is simply descriptive (e.g. a Walk In is a person who showed up to help without having signed up). But sometimes additional information is conveyed:

• See Processing Signup Requests regarding Pending and Ready.
• See Smart Check-in regarding Open.
• Let in Sub is the status you see after a user has clicked on a signup's Ask For Sub link (or you set it yourself on behalf of a user).
• A signup is incomplete if its status is Regrets, No Show, Pending, or Ready. When emailing "thanks for helping" messages after an event for example, people who only have incomplete signups are NOT sent to. Similarly they do not get "still time to signup" messages.
• Regrets, No Show, Done, Late, and Walk In explicitly mark a signup as done. Otherwise a signup is considered done only if it is past its scheduled time. (Done signups are listed apart when they and not-yet-done signups are displayed together).
• The Regrets status marks a signup as an excused absence. In other words, the signup is still visible but logically it no longer takes up a spot. Therefore unless the signup is in a schedule item whose Spots Available is UNLIMITED, the signup is no longer included in the item's spots-in-use count.

  You can simply give a signup the Regrets status when someone tells you she cannot make it. You can also create a separate cant-make-it schedule item and move a signup there before giving it this status. If you do this, you probably want to set the schedule item's Spots Available to UNLIMITED.

Note: Signups on the Show Signup pages have abbreviated Status menu items for Move, Replace, and Show Signups.

Zooming and Colors

When applicable, list-layout and grid-layout signup pages have a column, and each row has a zoom checkbox. Clicking on a zoom checkbox causes all signup info for that row to be displayed. An unzoomed schedule item's background is normally white. But if the item contains signups less than 24 hours old, its background color is set to light green-blue.

Similarly when signups are shown, the rules are as follows:

• Guest signups are highlighted with aqua. Otherwise age matters:
• A signup less than 24 hours old is highlighted with light green-blue.
• A signup between 24 and 72 hours old is highlighted with lighter green-yellow.
• All other signups have no highlighting.
• A signup's age is set to 0 hours when a signup occurs and when a sponsor is replaced with a specific person.

In the list layout, the highlighting is the background color of the signup. In the other layouts, it is a vertical bar to the left of the person's dropdown menu. However when calendars are color coded by who signed up, all other highlighting is suppressed to prevent the pages from being too busy.

Fullness (i.e. n-used of n-spots) is also color coded. In the list layouts, it goes from red to orange to green as the item goes from empty to (over)full. In the grid and calendar layouts, it is simplified to black is not-full and green is (over)full.

Status is also color coded. The name of a "minor" status (e.g. Behind) is not black. Conversely to be more visible, the background of a major status is not white. For example, the Status menu of an unapproved request has an orange background.

Shared Signups

Admin schedule pages and Signups per Person only list the signups that each person "owns", whereas One Person's Signups lists unowned ones as well (marked by via owner in the signup line). There are two situations where a signup applies to multiple people:

• When a signup explicitly identifies them (e.g. when both people reserving a tennis court are identified), the owner is the 1st sharer.
• When multiple people represent the same entity (i.e. their registrations all contain the same Represents value), the rep for whom the signup is done is the owner.

On self-signup pages and for auto-messages, there is no distinction between owned and unowned signups. In fact, that is the whole point. For example, if you (or a user) cancels a signup, you want all the affected users to receive the Cancel auto-message.

Processing Signup Requests

When someone (or you on behalf of someone) does a signup request, the created signup appears on the signup page with a status of Pending. Eventually you need to cancel the request or approve it.

One-Step Disposition of a Request

To cancel a request, click on its trash can. To approve a request, do Status menu->Approve. Since both are final dispositions of the request, they trigger a notification message (if you set this up).

Two-Step Approval Workflow

You can do a tentative approval if desired — by setting Status to Ready: either directly or by doing a Move. (Moved requests are normally given a status of Ready — on the assumption you have tentatively made a decision).

You can simultaneously approve all ready requests in all schedules of an event. To do this, move the mouse over the middle MORE menu and select Approve All Ready Requests. (By the way, if there is a Ready request you are not ready to approve, simply change its status back to Pending before doing the Approve All).

If you approve/reject all pending requests in one sitting, you probably do not want new requests coming in while you are doing this. One way to achieve this is to set Event Stage to Signups Over.

Moving Signups and Processing Multiple Signups at Once

To move a completed signup to a different place in the schedule, do Status menu->Sel / Reassign and then click on a Reassign button. To move an unapproved signup, do Status menu->Select / Move and then click on a Move button. For regular requests, the button's label is Move Here. For category requests, it is PUT HERE for its own specific schedule items and repurpose for the others (but normally you would only repurpose a signup after consulting with the user).

You can also move/reassign, cancel, approve, or set status of multiple signups at once:

• Do Status menu->Select / Move or Status menu->Sel / Reassign for some signup.
• Click on the Select link of the other signups you want to process.
• Click a target schedule item to move the selected signups there.
   OR
  Do one of the other actions on them via the Or You Can: menu.

Other things to note:

• The Unassign command is for unusual situations, like re-waitlisting someone whose situation is in flux. It sets the status of the selected signups to Pending, but does NOT send a notification message to their owner(s).
• Cancel, Reassign, and Approve do send notification messages if you have set this up. However if multiple signups are selected, the Allow You to Edit It policy degrades to the Automatically Send It policy.

Sliceable Schedule Items

Each schedule item of a sliceable activity has a Book Time button, and below that a bar showing its available times. Additionally, a sliceable item's signup form is more elaborate than a regular signup form. It includes a Service dropdown menu, and has multiple clickable times rather than a single OK button.

Booking a Service

If you do not desire the current service and feel like planning ahead, select a new current service. You can click the current-service-name link (right edge of schedule's title line) or any nn. You can also use the Display View box, via its Show Bookability Of field.

Steps to book the current service:

1. Find a Book Time button whose availability bar has a light green section that includes a time you are interested in.
2. Click on it to display its booking form.
3. Fill in any fields at the top of the form.
4. Click on the desired start time to book that time.

You can also choose a service after clicking on a Book Time button, but note the following things:

• A service selected like this applies only to the current booking (unless there is no current service yet).
• It may have different form fields than the current service.
• If it has a different duration, it may have different (or no) available start times.

(Note: some services may not be allowed at all sliceable schedule items. Click the booking form's Help link to see who offers what).

Availability Bars

The bar of colored columns below a Book Time button is called an Availability Bar. (It normally shows the item's entire time range, but you can set a shorter range by clicking on any ).

Color coding of availability bars:

• A column is Light Green if the current service's duration can be booked at that time.
• A column is Olive if it starts an available patch that is shorter than the current service's duration.
• A column is Red if its time is in use.

For example, suppose your current service is 90 minutes long and each column describes 30 minutes. Then whenever there are 3 consecutive not-in-use columns followed by an in-use column, the first column would be Light Green, the 2nd and 3rd Olive, and the 4th Red. (Conversely if your current service is 30 minutes long, the 1st 3 columns would all be Light Green. Note too, that if there was no current service yet, all 3 would be Olive).

Usually, a single column in an availability bar describes one start time. But if its time range has more than 24 start times and its provider has 4 starts/hour, each column describes 2 start times.