There are lots of reasons that you may wish to restrict access to your services. Whether you run a daycare with a screening process for new clients, have advanced level classes with prerequisites, or have any other kind of restricted service, BusyPaws allows you to control access through membership subscriptions and pet tags. These two functionalities restrict access in slightly different ways.
Memberships | Allow you to configure members-only services that are visible only to customers that have an active membership subscription. Non-members will not see the service listed for selection on the public services list. |
Custom Pet Tags | Allow only pets with/without certain tags to be registered for a service through client self-booking. On its own does not prevent clients from seeing the service on the public services list. |
In this guide we will take a look at the steps involved in restricting access to a service:
Setting Up Access to Your Restricted Service
Membership and tag restrictions can both be used on their own or in combination. While memberships control who can see a service to select it during booking, tags are used to limit which pets can be registered.
Through Memberships
To set up a members-only service, start by locating it on your Services page and making sure its "Publicly listed" toggle is turned off (grey). This will remove it from your public service list, preventing unauthorized clients from being able to book appointments of that type.
Clients can book any service through its direct link or website embed regardless of its public listing status. If you are looking to restrict access to a service, make sure you also remove its direct link/embed from your business' website.
Next, head to your Memberships page and select the "Add Membership" button at the top of the page.
Name your membership something indicating its use (i.e. Daycare Approved, Foundation Skills Grad, etc.), then set the "Invoicing Frequency" field to "One Time". For this use-case we will be manually assigning membership subscriptions so we can set the price to an arbitrary value (i.e. $5.00).
Membership prices cannot be set to $0.00, however when a user manually assigns a membership subscription for a client, they will not be charged.
Next, select the "Add Service" button under "Services Available Through Client Portal", then choose your restricted service from the drop-down menu. Use the "Add Service" button to add all the services you wish to include in your approval process (i.e. Full Day Daycare & Half-Day Daycare).
When you've added all of the services you want to include, click the "Create Membership" button at the bottom of the form.
With your membership created, you are ready to provide approved clients with access to your members-only services! Once a customer has been approved, one of your team members can navigate to their Customer Profile page, locate the "Memberships" list, and select the "Add/Edit" button.
The user can then choose the appropriate membership using the "Select Membership" field, then click "Add".
This assigns an active membership subscription to the customer's profile (without charging them). With an active subscription, the customer will be able to log into their Private Client Portal account to book their members-only service(s).
Note that memberships may also be used to control access to specific packages. This is achieved by assigning one or more existing memberships to a package in the "Restrict Purchasability" section of the "Edit Package" or "New Package" form.
For more information on memberships, check out our Memberships help article.
Through Pet Tags
Tags allow you to have a higher level of control over which pets are and are not allowed to be registered for a service. By using custom tags to restrict access, you can control access at the pet level. If a client has one pet that fits the criteria and a second pet that does not, only the one pet will be selectable to register during self-booking.
To set up tag-based restrictions for a service, start by locating it on your Services page and selecting either its name or the gear icon.
Locate the "Access Restrictions" settings. Click the + button under the "Exclude" or "Include" section to open a list of your available pet tags. After selecting a tag, click the + button gain to add another to the same section.
Tags added under "Tags to Exclude From Booking" will prevent any pets with those tags from being registered for the service. Tags added under "Tags to Require For Booking" will prevent any pets without those tags from being registered.
If a customer is able to book a service (i.e. because the service is publicly listed or they have access to it through a membership subscription) but their pet is not eligible for it due to tag restrictions, the pet will be listed as "Unavailable" during self-booking.
When a service has one or more tags required for booking customers will not be able to add new pets when self-booking that service.
After you have set up one or more pet tags on your account, they can be applied to and removed from specific pets via their Pet Profile page. For more information on creating and applying pet tags, check out our help guide on Custom Tags for Clients & Pets.
Configuring Your Screening Process
Once you have set up your membership(s) and tag(s) to provide access to any restricted services, it's important to consider how new clients will begin the approval process for those services. This can be achieved most easily using one of two methods:
Set up a publicly available service that customers need to book before being approved for the restricted service(s). i.e. A daycare meet and greet, an initial training consult, or any foundations level class with no prerequisites.
Create a contact form through which new customers can reach out to your team for approval. Embed/link the contact form on your website then turn on form submission notifications to know when clients submit a copy of your form.
As a general rule, our team recommends using the first method in most cases as it requires the smallest amount of administrative work from your team. Regardless of the method your business chooses to implement however, once a client has completed the approval process they may be provided access to the restricted service(s) through an assigned membership subscription.