By default a booking is confirmed the moment it is made. If your facility needs to vet who is using the space — schools, churches, community centres and anywhere with a permit process usually do — turn on approval and every request waits for a decision.
Turn approval on
In Settings, under Booking Settings, enable requiring admin approval for bookings. From then on new bookings arrive as pending rather than confirmed, and your admins are emailed that a request needs a decision.
Work the queue
Pending requests appear on your dashboard home so nothing sits unnoticed, and in the Bookings list filtered by pending status. From the list you can approve several at once, which is the difference between five minutes and half an hour after a busy weekend.
Rejecting well
Rejecting asks for a reason, and that reason goes into the email the requester receives. Take the extra ten seconds over it: "the hall is already booked for the school play that evening, try Thursday" turns a rejection into a rebooking, where a bare rejection turns into a phone call.
The reason is stored on the booking too, so the record explains itself later.
What each decision sends
- A new request emails your organisation admins
- Approving emails the person who booked, confirming the slot
- Rejecting emails them with your reason
- Cancelling a confirmed booking emails them with the cancellation reason
When approval is the wrong tool
If you are only trying to stop people booking outside your hours or for silly durations, venue operating hours and booking constraints do that automatically and without anyone having to click approve. Save approval for when you genuinely need a human to decide who gets the space.