Business Rules & Presets

Every business has its own rules about how bookings should work. Whether it's how far in advance clients can cancel, whether the system should warn when a walker is booked outside their working hours, or whether a full slot should automatically open a waitlist — Business Rules is where all of that lives.

Three presets cover the most common approaches. Simple is designed for new operators or solo practitioners who want most things allowed and minimal friction. Clients can book same-day, cancellations are flexible, and the system trusts you to handle exceptions manually. Structured is the balanced default for established businesses — reasonable notice windows, conflict warnings on by default, waitlist auto-promote enabled. Full Team is the strictest preset, designed for multi-staff operations where consistency matters: firm cancellation windows, overlap conflicts blocked rather than warned, all push notifications on, staff changes require a reason.

Switching preset applies all 29 knobs at once. From there, every individual knob can be overridden. Need Structured as your base but want to allow same-day bookings like Simple? Change that one knob. The rest stays Structured.

The 29 knobs cover four areas: conflicts (same-resource overlap, over-capacity daycare, bookings outside working hours, bookings on closure days), cancellation and reschedule windows (per-service override or operator-wide fallback), pool and dispatch behaviour (dispatch policy defaults, cross-pool reassignment rules), and notifications (which events trigger staff push alerts and which trigger client notifications). Every knob has a plain-English description of what it controls and what the consequence is for changing it — no jargon.

When an operator or team member with the right permission changes any knob from the preset default, they're prompted for a brief reason. That reason is written to the audit log alongside who made the change and when. If something unexpected happens six weeks later — a client was allowed to cancel an hour before a session that your policy says requires 24 hours — the audit log shows exactly when the rule changed and who changed it.