Seeing What's Booked on a Timeline

"Is the minibus free the weekend of camp?" used to mean opening equipment requests, hire bookings and the calendar separately and comparing dates by hand. The timeline view puts them all on one horizontal time axis, so you can see what's booked when — and where things collide — in a single glance.

Where to find it#

The timeline is a third view in three places you already use, reached from each one's existing view switcher rather than a new tab:

Each opens on its own layer, but the whole date range is loaded up front — so switching another layer on from the legend is instant. That's what makes the minibus question quick: from the Events view, turn on the equipment layer and you can see both at once.

Reading the timeline#

Each booking is a bar spanning the dates it covers.

• Colour tells you the status — provisional, confirmed, in use, overdue, finished or cancelled.
• The icon tells you what kind of booking it is — an equipment request, a checkout, a hire booking or an event.

Keeping those two signals separate means you never have to work one out from the other. Each bar's own wording (Pending, Partially approved, Draft, and so on) is still there in the tooltip when you hover.

Anything that overlaps is ringed in red with a warning icon, and the legend keeps a running count of clashes — so you can tell at a glance whether the window you're looking at has a problem.

Click any bar to open the record behind it — the request, the booking, or the event.

What the rows mean#

Rows mean different things depending on the layer, on purpose:

• Equipment and hire rows are the things themselves — a tent, the minibus, the main hall. The useful question is "what is booked out, and when".
• Event rows are your sections. For programme the useful question is what each section is doing and where they collide, not which object is involved. An event running for three sections draws a bar on each. Leader meetings and whole-group camps sit on a Whole group row.

Finding your way around#

Today is marked with a line and weekends are shaded, so a booking that runs across a weekend is obvious without counting days.

What's next#

• Equipment Requests and Approvals — creating and reviewing the requests that appear here.
• Checkouts and Returns — what happens when kit actually leaves the store.
• Managing Inventory — the items and categories the timeline groups by.