ANC uses Teamwork to house all intracompany business, which includes schedules for each location, upcoming events, project tasks, shared files, and images. It's a broad-based system that a number of their teammates use only for the calendar. Teamwork offers a great mobile application. For ANC, Teamwork is great “one-stop” platform.
Recently, ANC built some tiny houses and began looking for reservation software for guests to use when reserving a stay. They wanted one that looked like it would provide an easy experience for the customer and be able to generate the reports that would make their life easier. ANC's search lead us to Checkfront. The Checkfront WordPress plugin makes it easy for their customers to make reservations on their website. So Checkfront seemed perfect in all ways, except that it did not easily integrate with Teamwork.
Problem:
Pintop Solutions was hired to create a system to allow the Checkfront reservations to show up on the Teamwork “calendar”. The goal is for no booking to go overlooked and not allow double bookings. Everyone is to be notified of upcoming reservations so they do not have to check another website to find it. A subset of individuals should be notified of the calendar changes.
Solution:
The solution developed for ANC automatically adds new reservations to the Teamwork calendar. The reservation is only sent for certain types of projects. Each reservation is color coded on the Teamwork calendar based on event settings. Notifications are sent to the team members that are associated with the project in Teamwork.
To make it easy for ANC's webmaster to make changes as needed, Pintop Solutions created a WordPress plugin which uses the Checkfront API to pull all the booking categories from Checkfront. The Teamwork API is used to pull all the project types and event types. Once a reservation is made with Checkfront, a webhook is called that triggers the correct Teamwork API call to create the calendar event. If the reservation is canceled, the Teamwork calendar entry can either be deleted or labeled canceled based on the settings in the WordPress admin.
Updates
If the website is not available or Checkfront cannot access the triggers, the missed booking would have to be entered by hand. This problem has been solved by adding a manual sync feature. Notify Team now allows ANC's webmaster to go in, set the date to sync from and sync bookings, which means that it checks all bookings marked PAID in Checkfront and compares the events added to the Teamwork calendar. If it is paid in Checkfront but not displayed on the Teamwork calendar, it gets added to the calendar.
Launch Date: 07/23/2015
Project Type: WordPress Plugin
Last Updated: 03/25/2016
API's Used: Checkfront API and Teamwork API
