Staff Management with WooCommerce Bookings Plugin

WooCommerce-Bookings-and-Appointments-plugin

With this guide, we’ll tell you how to use the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin by PluginHive for staff management and availability. We’ll take a real-life example to show you how it can be done. So, read along to know more. 


 

Setting up Staff Management using the WooCommerce Bookings plugin

The WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin is one of the best solutions for WooCommerce users to set up bookings on their websites. It comes with a Staff management section that allows admins to manage their staff and team members.

You can assign each member to their bookable products. This would enable you to carry out most of the business cases without any trouble. Let’s take an example of a real business to check out how this plugin manages to put the Bookings plugin into the function.


 

Assigning subjects & courses to the teachers

Here-To-Learn is a proudly South African online tutoring website for students from grades 7 to 12. Students can enroll to get 1-on-1 online help and their online tutors are always there to help them with their homework or exams.

Students need to choose the instructors for the respective subjects they want to learn. Here’s how the teachers have been assigned the subjects based on their specialization and interests. 

  1. Andrea Fanizza – Mathematics
  2. Kyle Arthur – Mathematics
  3. Lizette Joubert – English
  4. Susan Richardson – English

Mathematics and English are all taught for 3 hours and the instructors will only be available to one class at a time. Since the teachers are really good with Mathematics and English coaching, the cost for each of the 3 hours courses:

  1. Mathematics – $100
  2. English – $50

 

How does the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin help with Online tutoring?

The WooCommerce Bookings Assets allow users to add one or more bookable assets (in this case, instructors) with the product. The list of instructors is displayed along with the booking calendar where students can choose any one of the instructors.

To set up the WooCommerce Bookings plugin based on this business case, you need to follow the steps given below.

  • Create two separate Bookable Products for the subjects Mathematics and English.
  • Once done, you need to set up the Booking Period, which can be found under the Booking tab.
    • Set the Booking Period to Fixed Blocks of 3 hours.
    • Set Maximum Bookings per block as 2 as only 2 instructors can either teach the course Mathematics or English at the same time.

fixed blocks of three hours

  • Now create instructors as assets and assign a quantity of 1 to each instructor so they can teach only one student at a time. The global settings for Booking Asset can be found by navigating to the WordPress Dashboard → Bookings → Settings → Assets.

staff management


Assign subjects to their respective instructors

For the Bookable product, Mathematics, you need to assign the Andrea Fanizza and Kyle Arthur. You need to select the option Let the customer choose to let students choose their favorite instructors at the time of booking.

choose staff members in product edit page

You can also define the Label name as per your need, in this case, we’ve given Choose your favorite instructor.

Tor the Bookable product, English, you need to assign Lizette Joubert and Susan Richardson. Thereafter, you need to again select the option Let the customer choose to let students choose their favorite instructors at the time of booking.

choosing staff members for english


Setting up the Booking Cost of each subject

Once you’ve assigned the teachers/instructors to their respective subjects, it’s time to set up the booking costs. For that, you need to go to the Booking Cost tab and enter the booking cost for every bookable product, i.e, Mathematics for $100 and English for $50.

For Mathematics:

booking cost of mathematics

For English:

booking cost of english


Setting up the instructor’s availability

Now that we’ve successfully created the instructors and know how to assign staff members to the subjects, it’s time we look at instructors’ availability. Under the Global Assets section under the Bookings settings, you can hover down to the Asset Availability.

woocommerce asset availability

As you can see, you have set up the availability of the instructors which will appear on the product page. This way the students can choose their instructors based on their availability and timings. 


 

Choosing the instructors on the WooCommerce Product page 

Once you’ve configured the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin based on your needs, the next step is to check out how it works on the product page. 

Let’s say a student wants to book a session with Kyle Arthur on 15th August at 9 AM for the subject Mathematics. To do so, the student has to choose Kyle Arthur from the drop-down and pay the required fee for Mathematics as shown below in the images. 

choosing staff for mathematics

select booking period for mathematics

booking availability for mathematics

From the above screenshots, it can be observed that Kyle Arthur isn’t available for any further bookings on 15th August at 9 AM. However, the remaining of instructors would still be available for bookings and thus, can be booked by other students. 


 

Conclusion

There you go! That’s how easy it is to assign staff members and maintain availability using the WooCommerce Bookings plugin by PluginHive. The staff management feature by this plugin is robust and it excels at delivering the best possible WooCommerce booking experience.

Feel free to Contact PluginHive Customer Support if you need help setting up bookings on your WooCommerce. Our support team should be able to help you out.

Good luck!