Venues, Facilities and Room Booking

Venues and facilities tell Qik where your events happen. A venue is a physical place with an address, such as a campus, office or clubhouse. A facility is a room or area at that venue, such as a meeting room, hall, court or studio. To book a room, add the facility to an event. Qik then stops anyone booking the same room for an overlapping time.

Key concepts

Events don't have a location field of their own. An event's location comes from its facilities. The event page shows a Location panel with the venue name, the rooms being used, the venue's address and a map. The venue needs an address for this panel to appear.

Setting up venues and facilities

Both live in the Events section of the dashboard, under the Venues ("Manage venues and locations") and Facilities ("Manage rooms and areas at your venues") shortcuts.

1. Open Venues and create a venue. Give it a title and fill in its Address.
2. Open Facilities and create a facility for each bookable room or area. Choose its Venue (required), and optionally set its Capacity.
3. Repeat for each venue.

Each facility belongs to one venue. If the same physical space is shared between two sites in your organisation, create it once under the venue where it actually is.

Booking a room for an event

When you create or edit an event, choose one or more rooms in the Facilities field. If the event has sessions, each session can also have its own facilities, for example a conference where the keynote is in the main hall and the breakouts are in smaller rooms. Qik treats every facility on the event and on any of its sessions as booked for the whole event's start and end time.

You can also book from the Facilities view, described below.

Double-booking protection

Qik won't let the same room be booked twice at the same time. When you save an event, Qik checks whether any of its facilities are already used by another event whose time overlaps. If so, the save is refused with a message naming the room, when it's taken and by which event. For example:

Lecture Theatre 2 is already booked 9:00am–12:00pm Thu 23 Oct by 'Leadership Workshop'. Change the time or room.

The rules are:

• Back-to-back is fine. An event ending at 9:00 and another starting at 9:00 in the same room don't clash.
• Non-events never clash. Events marked Non Event (placeholders, holiday periods or cancelled occurrences on the calendar) don't book the room and are never blocked.
• Deleted events don't count. Deleting an event frees its rooms.
• Only changes to the booking are checked. The check runs when an event is new, or when its times, rooms, Non Event setting or deleted state change. Editing the title or description of an event that is already double-booked won't be blocked.
• It applies everywhere. The rule covers the dashboard, imports, repeated events, the API and AI assistants alike.

Resolving a clash

• Change the time. Often the overlap is only a few minutes. Moving the start or end so the events sit back-to-back is enough.
• Choose another room. Use the Facilities view to see which rooms are free at that time.
• Change the other event. If the other booking is wrong or no longer needed, edit, delete or mark it as a Non Event, then save yours again.

Clashes when repeating events

• When you repeat an event a set number of times, any copy whose room is already taken isn't created. You'll see a message for each date that failed.
• An Event Repeater keeps the series going. It creates the event without the taken room and flags it Needs a room. The rooms it couldn't book are listed in the event's Rooms Not Booked field, and that list clears once you add a room back. See Recurring Events.

The Facilities view

The Facilities view shows bookings by room instead of by date. To open it, click Facilities next to an event type in the Events section, or switch an event list to the Facilities view.

• Rooms are listed down the side, grouped under their venue, with their capacity.
• Switch between Day and Week. Use Today and the arrows to move through time. In Week view, click a day to open it in Day view.
• Day view shows each room against the hours of the day, normally 7am to 11pm. The range widens if a booking falls outside it. Overlapping bookings are stacked so every title stays readable.
• Events with no room are shown together in an Other row at the bottom.
• Bookings are coloured by the event's first scope that has a colour. Non-events appear faded.
• Any double booking already in your data is shown in red with a ⚠ symbol, and hovering over it says "double-booked". Existing overlaps aren't removed automatically. Use this to find and fix them.
• Every event in a room is drawn, so you can see everything occupying it. Events that the list's search or filters leave out are dimmed rather than hidden.
• Click a booking to open its actions (view, edit, duplicate and so on). Use the ⋯ button beside a room or venue for that record's actions.

Booking from the Facilities view

In Day view, hover over a room's row to see a marker snapped to the nearest quarter hour. Then:

• Click to start a one-hour booking at that time, or
• Drag across the row to choose the exact start and end.

Either way, the event create form opens with the room, start and end already filled in. Add a title and save. If you opened the view from a particular event type, the new event is created as that type.

Permissions

• Venues and facilities are content types with their own permissions. You need access to them to see the Venues and Facilities shortcuts and the rooms in the Facilities view.
• Facilities aren't assigned to scopes in the dashboard. A facility is organised by the venue it belongs to.
• Booking a room is part of creating or editing an event, so it needs the event permissions. The clash check applies to everyone, including administrators. It also looks at events the person can't see. Someone may be told a room is taken by an event that isn't visible to them.

Finding free rooms with the API

Builders can ask Qik which rooms are free for a time. Send POST /event/rooms/free with startDate and endDate, and optionally capacity (a minimum number of people) and venue. The response lists free rooms, and busy rooms with a count of the bookings in the way. A save that clashes fails with status 409 and the error type facility_clash. The error data lists each clashing event and the shared rooms.

Tips

• Fill in Capacity on your facilities. It's shown in the Facilities view and lets builders search for rooms big enough for a group.
• Add an address to every venue, so events show a map and location.
• Mark cancelled events as Non Event rather than leaving them active. This keeps them on the calendar for reference while freeing the room.

FAQs