This guide covers all aspects of scheduling in Payaca, from booking customer appointments to managing your team's diary. While most booking will happen within a specific project, the main schedule provides a powerful overview of your entire business's operations.
The Main Schedule View
You can access the main, company-wide schedule by clicking Schedule in the left-hand menu. This view provides several tools to help you manage your team's time effectively.
Navigating the Calendar
Views: You can switch between Day, Week, and Month views. You can also toggle between a standard Calendar grid and a Timeline view, which shows each user on a separate row.
User Filtering: Click on the user avatars at the top to filter the calendar and see only the schedules for specific team members.
Hide Non-Business Hours: In the view dropdown, we highly recommend enabling the Show only business hours toggle. This cleans up the calendar by hiding evenings and weekends, making it much easier to read.
Navigation: Use the Today button to jump to the current date, or the Jump to date tool to go to a specific day in the past or future.
Using the Map View
The Map tab shows the geographical location of all appointments for the selected time period. This is extremely useful for planning efficient travel routes, or for finding a slot for a new job when you know you'll be in a particular area. You can also use the location search bar to see what appointments are scheduled near a specific address or postcode.
Finding Jobs to Book (To Be Scheduled)
The To Be Scheduled section is a tool that helps you identify projects that do not have a future appointment booked. You can filter this list by pipeline and stage to quickly find new leads that need a survey booking or completed jobs that require a follow-up visit.
Booking an Appointment
While you can book from the main schedule, the most common way to create an event is from within a project.
Navigate to the project and click on the Schedule tab.
Find the team member you want to assign the job to.
Click directly on an empty time slot in their calendar.
A pop-up will appear where you can either select an event template or start from scratch.
Fill in the event details, check the assigned user and time are correct, and click Create event.
Managing Event Details
When you create or click on an event, a side panel opens showing all its details. Here you can manage several key aspects of the appointment:
Tasks: Add tasks that need to be completed during the visit. These can be simple checklists, PDF forms for sign-offs, or responsive forms that feed data back into the project.
Attachments: Attach files to the event to make them easily accessible for the engineer in the field app. You can upload new files or link files that are already in the project's Files tab.
Time Logs: View any time that has been logged against the event (e.g., travel or on-site time). You can also manually add time logs here.
Contacts to Notify: This section controls who receives automated reminders and the "on the way" notification. The system will automatically select site contacts or the primary project contact, but you can manually change or add people here.
Creating Event Templates
Event templates are a powerful way to save time and ensure consistency when booking common types of appointments.
Click your company name in the top right and go to Templates.
Select Event templates and click to create a new one.
You can pre-define the following information:
Event Name: The title of the appointment (e.g., "Heat Loss Survey").
Description: A default description for the event.
Default Duration: The standard length of time this appointment should take (e.g., 2 hours).
Tasks: Pre-load any checklists or forms that are always required for this type of job.
Tags: Add default tags, which can be used to trigger specific automations.
Once saved, this template can be selected every time you book a new event.
General Schedule Settings
You can configure default settings for your entire schedule to streamline your workflow. Navigate to My Company > Schedule to find these options.
Automatic Reminders
Here you can set up standard appointment reminders that apply to all events. For example, you can create an email reminder to be sent to the "Contacts to Notify" 24 hours before the appointment. Note: If you have custom automations set up, you may not need to use these standard reminders.
Business Hours & Calendar Colours
Set your company's standard working days and hours here. This works with the "Show only business hours" filter in the main schedule. You can also set the logic for how events are coloured in the calendar. We recommend using Task Status, which provides a great visual overview:
White: Upcoming
Yellow: In Progress
Red: Overdue
Green: Complete
I hope this helps you get the most out of Payaca's scheduling features.
If you have any more questions or need further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact our support team via the chat option in the bottom right.