New Inventory Calendar Experience: Overview

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Locate: Calendar > Inventory > Enable New Inventory Calendar
Early Access: Optional early access is now available to all accounts! Available permanently for all new accounts created after December 1, 2020. Learn more below.
Prerequisites:

Admin permissions or restricted permissions to View calendars and Change Daily Inventory Availability.
Bookings, bookings, and more bookings!
The Inventory Calendar is available to those using items (Inventory > Items), a feature of our classic version of Checkfront.
Interested in using the Inventory Calendar with products (Inventory > Products)? Your account must be a member of our Early Access Program.

Early Access Program

The new product feature mentioned in this article is also currently part of our Early Access Program, which means it is available to select Customers to try out and provide us with feedback.

To learn more about becoming part of our Early Access Program check out our related blog post or contact our Technical Support team.

Find our complete set of help articles related to the Early Access Program here: Early Access Program.

Overview

New Inventory Calendar

We listened to your feedback about our Inventory Calendar, studied your business use cases, and learned what functionality gaps existed. We then took that knowledge and along with some muscle-power built a new, improved Inventory Calendar.

We are now ready to welcome you to our next Inventory Calendar experience!

Our new Inventory Calendar should more closely meet your business needs and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can collaborate to further enhance the experience.

Benefits of the Update

The new, improved experience provides the following benefits...

A fresh modern look. As with other recent improvements, the new look and feel provide ease of use and a consistent experience throughout the app.
Improved performance. Spend less time waiting for pages to load.
More information upfront including smarter default settings. The calendar view now defaults to six weeks instead of two.
A more complete picture of availability. See how much inventory is left per date and time, the base availability prior to any bookings, and the number of bookings consuming that inventory.
The popularity of inventory at a glance. Booking count per inventory item/product now displays.
Control manual inventory adjustments and quickly review and search bookings already made for that time through the new inventory side panel.
Quickly review all bookings for a particular day and time without having to open up individual invoices via the new booking side panel.
More robust filters, which provide flexible views for Staff to review availability for specific inventory.

What's New?

The following are highlights of what has changed.

For more detailed instructions, please see our series of articles on the Inventory Experience:

Inventory Calendar - New Experience: Introduction

What's New?	New Calendar Experience	The Details
Calendar Display, Filters, and Default Views
Smarter defaults		The default values of controls and settings are now smarter. For example, the default view of the Inventory Calendar displays six weeks' worth of Inventory as opposed to only two weeks. This means you can see more without needing to change the filters.
New Items/Products filter		A new Items/Products filter makes it easy to manage specific Inventory without the need to do a keyword search! Filter for as many Items/Products at a time as you need.
Bookmark filter selections		All filter views made from within the page continue to be saved to the URL for easy bookmarking.
Changing Inventory, Viewing Time-slot Data, and Reading the Calendar
Inventory is now controlled independently for each time-slot		Rolled-up Inventory amounts no longer display for time slots or flex time. Inventory is now controlled within each specific time slot. Important: The Adjust stock by setting is no longer present for adjusting multiple time-slots at once within the cell. A new bulk inventory adjustment experience will be coming shortly!
Clearly displayed Inventory counts and booking numbers		The adjustment process is no longer tied to relative stock, which means no more manual math! It’s much easier to remove or add Inventory and see the total available number without the need to do calculations.
More thorough audit history.		A note is now required when making an Inventory adjustment to ensure a thorough audit history.
The Calendar is now easier to read, with a simplified design.		Inventory with adjustments continues to be distinguished and identified by a marker in the top-right corner.
		Availability can be determined at a glance through colour-coded text, instead of changing background colours. Gray \| no availability set for this date/time Blue \| 50% or more availability Yellow \| Less than 50% availability Red \| Sold out/not available
		The booking count is prominently displayed to communicate the number of bookings that consume Inventory at that date & time.
		The quantity of available Inventory is now displayed next to Base Availability to make it easier to understand how much was originally available. The Base Availability number is displayed for reference purposes and can only be changed if the item's inventory configuration is updated. (Edit Item - Attributes > Inventory)
Consistent and prominent display of booking types.		Booking types (time-slot, per day, per night...) now consistently display under the Inventory name.
New expand all rows option		The new Expand rows option allows you to quickly and easily expand your view of single categories so that Inventory numbers are displayed. This is very helpful if several different categories of items/products are booked for that day. You then can Expand and Collapse the category rows to make visible the information that you need.
Parent and child items nested		Child items continue to be nested under their parent items, but this is now made more clear with new visual indicators - a bullet point (•) for parents and an arrow (>) for the child items. The sum of availability is no longer displayed on the parent so that you can focus on what is actually bookable at the child-level.
Days greyed out when inventory not available		Days, where Inventory is not available, are greyed out and no Inventory adjustments can be made. This includes where... Item/product availability is not yet configured. Items/products have closure events. Items/products are not set up for that day Note, if the configuration is incomplete, where the item is unavailable by default with no item event associated to make it available, then the cell would appear greyed out, as well.
Historical view preserved		You can now access historical Inventory records! Consumption numbers are preserved to provide a snapshot of your past data.
New Side Panel A side panel replaces the modal, providing richer booking data and a more consistent experience.
New Inventory tab		Inventory adjustment options now display within a new tab and side panel that is designed to improve legibility and reduce the chance of adjustment errors.
New Inventory tab		You can now manually adjust Inventory up (+) and down (-), without needing to calculate and remember the original number.
New Booking tab		Bookings are now displayed on their own separate tab within the new side panel.
		Do you have a large number of bookings for the day in focus? You can search for specific bookings using the following information. Bookers name Booking Code/ID Phone Number Email Item/Product names (keywords)
		Additional booking details are now provided, allowing for quick updates and access to information. Booking code Items/products booked Booker (first and last name) Contact information (email address) Booking Start and End date and times Payment made and balance Due Booking status Check-in and Check-out functionality
New Activity Log tab		The new Activity Log tab displays log entries for each adjustment made to the Inventory Calendar, including the following information for each. The quantity before and after the adjustment. The name of the Staff account that made the adjustment. The date and time of the adjustment. Link out to the full Account Activity Report (where permissions allow) for quick access to the full audit history.

Enable the New Inventory Calendar

Enable New Inventory Experience

To give the new Inventory Calendar experience a try, simply click on Enable New Inventory Calendar in the message at the top of the current Inventory Calendar. You can revert back to the original at any time.

Share Feedback

Inventory Calendar Share

Share your feedback through the application by simply selecting the Share Feedback option at the top of the page under the Inventory Calendar title. We look forward to receiving your feedback!

Disable New Inventory Calendar

Inventory Calendar Disable

Have you checked out the new Inventory Calendar and provided feedback, but are not quite ready to commit to the new experience just yet? Simply click Disable the New Calendar and the Inventory Calendar will revert to the original experience until a future date when enough feedback has been incorporated and the calendar is ready for general release. You can also always enable the new experience again at any time using the link in the banner at the top of the page.

Inventory Calendar - New Experience: Introduction >

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