How to Create a Booking
This guide covers the steps needed to reserve and check out assets to a person within your organization using Shelf's booking feature, ensuring equipment availability when needed.
With a booking, you can reserve and check-out a selection of assets to a person (custodian) within your organization. Bookings help ensure that certain equipment is available when you or a team member needs it.
Creating a booking
Start by going to the Bookings area.
- Click New booking to create a booking
- Give your booking a Name
- Specify a Booking period by choosing a start and end time/date
- Select a Custodian to whom the assets will be checked out
- Click View assets list, or Scan QR codes to add assets by scanning them. The line above the buttons says what happens: "This creates a draft. You can reserve it from the booking page." (Base users read request a reservation instead.) Shelf saves the booking as a Draft, and the confirmation reads Draft created. A draft holds nothing yet: the assets on it stay free for other bookings until you reserve it
- Use the Asset manager modal to find and add/remove assets from the booking. You can use the filters and search bar to quickly find assets. Only assets that are Available during the specified booking period will show by default.
- Click Confirm when you've added the assets
- Optionally, expand the Notification recipients section to add specific users who should receive email updates about this booking (in addition to the custodian and workspace defaults)
- Click Reserve to confirm the booking. Base users see the same button labelled Request reservation. The status of the booking will change from Draft into Reserved or Ongoing depending on the current date/time and the start date/time specified under booking period
Step 9 is the one that holds the gear. Until you click Reserve, the booking is a plan that shows in nobody else's bookings list or calendar, and nobody else is stopped from booking the same assets. When you start a booking from an asset's Book menu, or from Book selection on the assets list, the assets are already chosen, so the form's button reads Create draft and takes you straight to the draft. While a booking is a draft, its Save button and the Unsaved changes bar read Save draft.
A draft whose start time has passed cannot be reserved as it is. Reserve (or Request reservation) is greyed out with the reason "The start time has passed. Move it later to reserve." Move the start date later in the form and the button comes back straight away, before you save. If your workspace sets a Minimum advance notice under Booking time restrictions, Self-service and Base users also see the button greyed out while the start is too close, for example "Start date must be at least 2 hours from now. Move it later to reserve." Owners, Administrators and Managers are not held to the notice, only to a start that has already passed.
The Custodian list is set by your role. Owners, Administrators and Managers can name anyone in the workspace, and can search the list. Self-service and Base users see one name — their own — because the booking they are making is for themselves; that is what makes a Base user's booking a request an administrator releases. The list is decided on the server, so it reads the same in the Shelf Companion app as it does here, and the workspace's custody visibility setting does not widen it.
Reserve stays greyed out until the booking holds at least one asset or one model reservation, and nothing on it is marked unavailable or already booked for your dates. The button's tooltip names which of the three is in the way. See Troubleshooting: Booking Conflicts.
The booking period picker reads in your own date format, time format, and time zone, and its calendar starts the week on the day you chose. Set those once under Account settings → General. Because they belong to your account rather than the workspace, a custodian in another country reads the same booking on their own clock, and the email they get is formatted for them.
Your time zone is what the times mean, on every route into a booking: this form, the Create booking dialog on the Assets page, Extend booking, Duplicate, and the Shelf Companion app. On the phone, if you have set a time zone on your account, that is the one used rather than whatever zone the handset happens to be in, so a booking you make on the road still means the hours you intended.
The one thing your time zone does not move is the workspace's working hours. Those are the opening times of the physical location, the same for everyone.
Export a booking to your calendar
Once a booking is no longer in Draft status (Reserved, Ongoing, Overdue, or Completed), you can export it as a calendar event. Open the booking and click Add to Calendar to download an .ics file. Opening this file adds the booking event — including the start and end dates and a direct link back to the booking — to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, or any RFC-compliant calendar app.
This is useful for custodians who want the reservation to appear in their personal calendar, and for managers who need to keep their schedule aligned with Shelf bookings.
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