Slack Notifications

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool, enabling communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner. Channels can be created where team members can communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). They are open to everyone in the chat, provided they have first been invited to join. These channels can also be configured to receive booking notifications from your Checkfront account. This means, when a booking is made in your Checkfront system, the allocated Slack channel will receive a notification, alerting you to the new reservation.  

To the right of this is an icon, depicted by a plus sign in a circle. Click on this to create your new channel. The first piece of information you will need to provide is a name for the channel. This can be whatever you like, but it's best to keep it short, sweet and easily recognizable. The channel name begins with a hashtag, but this is automatically added for you.  

If you wish to invite other team members to join the channel, search for them by name in the next field. This is optional and not required. You can also enter a purpose for the channel. This is just a description of what the channel will be used for. Again, this is optional. Finally, if you wish to keep the group private, click on the green switch at the top which is labelled Public. The switch will turn orange and say Private instead. When you are happy, click on the green Create Channel button at the bottom.  

Once you have your channel created in Slack, it's time to configure the add-on in Checkfront. Login to Checkfront and navigate to Manage > Add-ons from the main menu.  

Locate the Slack Notifications tile, hover over it with your mouse and click on the Setup button. This will launch the setup window, as seen above. Enter the channel name created in the previous step. Make sure you put the hashtag at the front, as this is required. By default, the Post New Booking Notifications option will be checked. Whenever a new booking is made, either by a customer/partner on the front end, or a staff member in the back end, a notification will be sent to the Slack channel. It's also possible to send a notification when a note is added to a booking by a staff member. If you'd like to activate this option, check the box labelled Post Staff Notes When ready, click the blue Activate button in the bottom right corner of the window.  

You will now be asked to sign-in to your team's Slack account.  

Enter your Slack domain and click Continue. Depending on how your login is setup at Slack, choose the option that applies to you and complete the login.  

At this point, you will be asked to confirm the integration with Checkfront. Click Authorize to finalize the process.  

You should now be ready to receive booking notifications through your Slack channel. The next step is to test it! Go ahead and create a test booking in your system, or wait for a new live booking to come in. Once a booking has been completed, you should see a notification it the Slack channel you have linked to Checkfront.  

Clicking on the booking ID, within the Slack notification, will launch the booking in Checkfront in a new browser window.

Each booking notification in Slack is highlighted in blue. This does not correspond to the colours of your booking statuses in Checkfront. Booking status colours are not carried over to Slack. Also, notifications are only sent for new bookings. No other booking status will be triggered, for example, booking cancellations.