Introducing bulk schedule updates using operating hours – Help Center

Operating hours allow you to set up and manage your venue’s trading hours, including the days you’re closed and temporary hours for special events or changes.

Once set up, you can then link your product schedules to your operating hours, and any changes to your operating hours automatically adjust any linked schedules. This saves you time in making manual updates, prevents schedule errors and maximizes your venue capacity for any given day.

How does it help?

By setting up your operating hours, you'll have one place in ROLLER to manage your regular product schedules with consistent session times, tickets and resources, as well as any temporary adjustments to operating hours.

By linking regular product schedules for your time-based activities to operating hours, ROLLER automatically generates session times available for guests to book within those hours.
Any modifications you make to your operating hours, including changes for school holiday periods or closures for maintenance or weather, are automatically reflected in the linked schedules, making sure schedules are always up-to-date. No need to go in and individually update the schedules for each product.
With operating hours managing changes to operating hours and varying temporary hours for school holidays and other special days, you won't require as many individual product schedules.
Plus, you can set a maximum booking window for guests to book into the future, with each day automatically extending on a rolling basis. No need to manually extend each schedule at the end of the booking window.
And even when using operating hours to manage your schedules, you still have the flexibility to create and manage schedules that operate outside regular hours or fully customized schedules that run at irregular times during the day.

How it works

Set up your operating hours: standard hours and any temporary hours: If you’re a new customer, you’ll be asked to set up your operating hours the first time you try to create a schedule for a product. If you’re an existing customer, you can do this at any time.
Link product schedules to operating hours: When creating product schedules for your time-based products and activities, you can choose to link them with your opening and closing times set up in your operating hours. ROLLER will automatically generate session times for guests to book into between the opening and closing times.
Automatic updates: Any changes to your operating hours will automatically extend or reduce your session times for any linked products. This makes sure that the availability of your sessions is always up to date without the need for manual adjustments.
Auto-renewal: You can define the maximum future booking window which automatically extends on a rolling basis. This eliminates the need for manual extensions, saving you time and effort.

If you have existing schedules, this new feature doesn't disrupt current schedules. However, any new schedules can be linked to operating hours once you've set them up. Refer to the guide Migrating existing product schedules to operating hours

Get started

How you get started depends on whether you’re a new customer or existing customer.

New customers

From Venue Manager, go to Products > Schedules and you'll be required to set up your operating hours before you can set up any product schedules.

Learn how to set up your operating hours

Existing customers

If you’re an existing customer, you’ll be able to use operating hours and set them up at a time that's convenient to you.

Importantly, the new feature does not disrupt current schedules upon its introduction. Your current schedules will be configured in the same way with the same sessions available to book, and won't be linked to operating hours.

Once you've set up your operating hours, any new product schedules you create can be linked to operating hours so you can take advantage of the new features straight away. Learn more

For current product schedules, we recommend you review your product schedules and choose one of your most common regular schedules to try out first. Choose a product schedule which starts when your venue opens and ends when your venue closes, with consistent session start times and the same tickets and resources for each session.
Then, set an end date for the current schedules, and recreate schedules for the product using operating hours, starting from the date after the end date of the existing schedules, and fully link it to your operating hours.
With operating hours managing the varying temporary hours for school holidays and other special days, you won't require as many schedules. You can set an end date to expire these schedules or delete them.
Plan a time to replace regular schedules with new schedules using operating hours (eg when you next need to extend your current schedules). There may be some cases where you may want to keep your irregular schedules as customized schedules with custom date schedule periods (eg product schedules with varying ticket types and schedules for a specific date or dates).

Common schedule scenarios

Take a look at how you can create a range of product schedules using operating hours:

FAQs

We regularly change our operating hours, will this work for my venue?

Yes, this feature is perfect for your venue! You can create as many temporary hours as you like, and all your schedules linked to operating hours will automatically use the adjusted hours.

We sometimes have to close at the last minute due to bad weather. Can operating hours help me with this?

Yes! Create temporary hours and set the day to "closed," and all linked products will automatically be unavailable for purchase. Existing bookings will not be impacted.

My venue isn’t open yet, but I want to prepare my schedules ready for opening. How can I do that?

When you first create your standard hours, you can choose to start at a later date. If you do this, we'll set your hours as closed up until your open date. If your opening date changes (we know it happens sometimes!), then you can easily adjust this by editing the prepared standard hours.

We’re permanently changing our opening hours next month, but don’t want to change our current hours. How can I do that?

We allow you to prepare one change at a time to your standard hours and pick a date when the new hours become active. Simply edit your standard hours, select the option to start on a future date, and save. If you need to adjust this date or make changes to the hours, you can do this at any point by editing the prepared hours.

Learn more

Refer to the detailed guides to learn how to set up your operating hours and create product schedules subject to these hours: