Projects automatically marked as booked when a consult fee is paid

Unfortunately, HB considers any project with a signed contract or paid payment as a booked project. Where is it that having the “booked” status for these particular clients is affecting your process?

​@Farmstead Catering Where are you seeing the project marked as “booked”? Is it in your pipeline or in reports you are running?

There might be a few ways around this - I have a client who has a similar process - but I'd love to hear your pain point so I know whether or not it will work for you. 

Is the main concern that it's blocking your calendar prematurely? Moving in the pipeline? Or something else?

​@Tonisha J Stalnaker ​@Cassie H of Premier Ops Spot ​@Alyssa Nance  I am seeing it “Booked” on our calendar, and if we have any other inquiries for that date it will say that we already have an event booked for that date (even though we don’t). And it is moving the project in our pipeline to the “Retainer Paid”, when really it is no where near being signed or the retainer being paid. I often haven’t even sent the clients our proposal yet. The issues this is creating is that we need to know when we are booked or not, and having to manually move projects around is a pain. And when projects get moved to “Retainer Paid”, then other automations begin, and they shouldn’t until the retainer is actually paid. 

To explain a bit more: we are a catering company that caters events and we typically only do one event per weekend. We really need to know when we are actually booked or not, so that our process can go smoothly. 

​@Farmstead Catering I was thinking you would mention it being a calendar problem. I’m assuming once you know the date of the event they are interested in, you’re putting it in the project details, correct? Or is this automatically getting added there from a form they fill out when they inquire? Either way, you can actually go into the project where the date is listed and mark it as free until they officially book the date. There’s also a setting under company settings preferences tab. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and look for “project availability” and toggle that off. One of those should help with the calendar issue.

I’m assuming you’re using the new automations 2.0 builder based on your reply, is that correct? If so, there are several things you can do to help with the other issues you’re having. And actually the first thing will work even if you’re using the old builder. But it sounds like you may have a pipeline based automation set up to move projects to the “retainer paid” stage when they make a payment. You can turn that off under your pipeline settings.

Since HB will still consider projects with a payment made as booked, tags might be a great way to distinguish booked projects from those who are still in the consultation process. I’m assuming your consultation is like a paid tasting of sorts? You could create a “consultation” tag to apply to projects still in that stage so that you can include/exclude projects with that tag at different points of your automations.

Without seeing how you have things set up, it’d be hard to direct you on exactly where to implement this into your steps, but I’d be happy to hop on a virtual call to talk you through this if you’re interested. I find most people find it super beneficial to talk through automations, especially the new builder, face-to-face. Here’s a link to book a time, if you’d like: https://clientportal.graceandflowsystems.com/schedule/68c480446f5494003583b0a9

Either way, let me know if any of this sounds like it might solve the issue you’re having or if I could provide further detail/examples.

​@Alyssa Nance I just booked a session, thank you so much! I look forward to connecting.