Asking the calendar

The phone rings while you're mid-checkout. "Can you fit me in Tuesday?" The answer is somewhere on a grid of twelve columns you'd have to scroll and read.

Type the question instead.

Opening it

Assist sits in the calendar header. Press it and a panel opens above the grid with three modes in it; press it again and the panel is gone, taking no height with it. Anything you'd half typed is still there when you come back.

Ask

The question box answers three things, and knowing which three is most of the skill:

• What a day or a stretch of days looks like — how many appointments, who has them, what's unconfirmed. "What does Thursday look like?"
• Who has gaps on a day — every stylist's free windows and how long each is. "Who has gaps on Tuesday?"
• When a client is next in — or, if nothing's booked, roughly when they're due back based on how often they usually come. "When is Nina next in?"

Ask it about money, marketing or payroll and it says what it can answer rather than routing your question to the nearest thing it has. That's the behaviour you want: a wrong answer delivered confidently is worse than no answer.

Gaps are worked out for one day. A question shaped like "where are the gaps this week" comes back about a single day and tells you which one — so if you meant the week, ask the days you care about.

Book and Change

Moving and cancelling work the same way and say so on the card: Nothing moves until you press Move it, and Nothing is cancelled until you press the red button.

The three tools on the right

Beside the sentence box, separated from it because they're a different sort of thing:

• Fill gaps finds appointments with processing time in the middle — a colour developing, say — and shows what could be booked into that dead half hour.
• Standing looks for clients who come at the same time every few weeks and offers to turn each one into a repeating appointment. One click per client.
• Day summary writes up the day: what came in, who didn't show, what's still open, and what tomorrow looks like.

Each one runs when you open it, and only then.