Room double-bookings in Planning Center Calendar: catching them before Sunday
Two groups arrive at the fellowship hall at the same time, both sure they booked it. A few minutes with Planning Center Calendar before the weekend can prevent most of these moments.
How Calendar handles overlapping requests
- Calendar lets more than one event request the same room or resource. When the times overlap, the requests are in conflict, and the people set up to resolve conflicts are notified.
- Conflicts are listed on the Approvals tab of the Events page. Choose Resolve, then decide which event gets the room or let them share it, optionally add a reason, and confirm.
- Rooms can have approval groups who are notified when a room is requested. Pending events show in yellow and rejected ones in red.
- A room that has been blocked out can't be requested.
Double-bookings that still slip through
- Setup and teardown. If an event's booked time covers only the event itself, two bookings can look separate on paper and still collide in the room: the 9:30 set-up crew meets the 9:00 class that runs late.
- Rooms that should never be shared. Resolving a conflict by sharing is sometimes right and sometimes not. A sanctuary during a rehearsal is usually not shareable.
- Unresolved conflicts. A conflict waiting on the Approvals tab is easy to leave until Sunday morning.
- Bookings that never reached Calendar. A rehearsal arranged by text message won't appear as a conflict at all.
A five-minute weekly habit
- Open the Approvals tab and resolve anything waiting.
- For your busiest rooms, look at this weekend's bookings and add the setup and teardown time your team actually needs.
- Write down which rooms are never shared, so whoever resolves conflicts decides the same way.
- Ask ministry leaders to put rehearsals and extra meetings into Calendar, not just into a text thread.
Where Ozzie fits
With your consent, Ozzie reads Calendar room bookings and checks them against your church rules, such as “the sanctuary is not shared” and “allow 30 minutes of setup”. When two bookings collide under those rules it shows a “Room use needs review” item with its source and the time it was checked. Ozzie only reads: you resolve the conflict in Calendar yourself. See how it works.
Sources
From Planning Center's help center, checked when this guide was published. Planning Center changes its product from time to time, so check these pages for the current details.