A single meeting room or one therapist is easy to schedule. Things get more interesting when you have twenty storage units, forty rental bikes, a hundred lockers, or a dozen holiday cabins. Every one of them needs to be bookable, you want to see at a glance what is free and what is taken, and bookings often run for days or weeks rather than an hour.
SuperSaaS handles this well, but a schedule with many resources benefits from a few settings that a small schedule does not need. This article walks through three of them: putting all your resources in one schedule, switching to a horizontal view to keep the overview readable, and deciding whether customers pick a specific unit or simply get one assigned.
Throughout, we use our Storage Unit Reservations demo as the example. It contains fifteen units of different sizes with reservations that span multiple days, which makes it a good stand-in for any rental business.
Step 1: Put all your resources in one schedule
The first question is which of the three schedule types to use. For rentals, the answer is almost always a resource schedule: each storage unit, bike or cabin becomes one resource, and a booking blocks that resource for the duration of the rental. Bookings on a resource schedule can have any length, so a two-hour bike rental and a six-month storage contract can live side by side on the same calendar.
You could create a separate schedule for every unit, but resist that temptation. Our documentation on combining schedules puts it simply: if you have interchangeable resources, it is best to place them in the same resource schedule. One schedule means one place to set opening hours, prices and booking constraints, one overview for you, and one link to hand out to customers. There is no limit on the number of resources you can add to a schedule.
A few practical tips when adding many resources:
- Use names that carry information. The demo names its units
Unit A01 · 25 sq ft, so the size is visible without opening a booking. For bikes, that might be the frame size; for cabins, the number of beds. - Keep the order logical. Resources are listed in the order you define them under Configure > Resources. Group them by building, row or type so the overview reads naturally.
- Price per unit if needed. Different sizes usually mean different prices. With advanced pricing rules you can charge a different price per unit, add seasonal rates, or discount longer rentals.
Step 2: Switch to a horizontal view
By default, SuperSaaS draws the week and day views vertically: time runs from top to bottom and each resource gets its own column. That works nicely for a handful of resources, but with fifteen or more, the columns become too narrow to read, and a reservation that runs from Monday to Friday is split into five separate pieces.
The horizontal layout flips this around. Each resource gets its own row, time runs from left to right, and a multi-day booking becomes a single bar that stretches across the days it covers. As our documentation on views puts it, horizontal is useful if you have a large number of resources, or if bookings often span across midnight. Rentals tick both boxes.
To switch, open Configure > Layout on your schedule. In the Options column next to the Month, Week and Day views, choose Horizontal instead of the default Vertical. While you are there, it is worth setting the week view as the default view, since that is the one most customers will want to see, and hiding any views you do not need.
Two related settings help when the list of resources gets long:
- The resource filter. Above the calendar, users can pick a single resource from a dropdown to see only that unit. On the demo, try selecting
Unit B03 · 200 sq ftto see how the calendar reduces to one row. This is the quickest way for a customer to check whether the unit they had in mind is free. - Direct links to a resource. You can send a customer straight to one unit by adding the resource name to the schedule URL. Our article on referring customers to a specific resource explains how.
If you ever need the horizontal layout without changing the settings, add ?dir=h to the schedule URL. The reverse, ?dir=v, works too. You can find more URL tricks in the documentation.
Note that mobile users do not see the vertical or horizontal week view at all. They get a compact month calendar with a list of available slots underneath, which works well regardless of how many resources you have.
Step 3: Decide who picks the unit
With the schedule set up and readable, there is one more decision to make: does the customer choose a specific unit, or do you want to assign one?
Let the customer choose
If your units differ in ways that matter to the customer, let them choose. A storage customer cares whether they get 25 or 500 square feet, a cabin guest cares about the number of bedrooms, and a bike renter wants the right frame size. In this case the resource schedule is all you need: the customer opens the calendar, finds a unit that suits them, and books it. This is how the demo works.
Assign a unit automatically
Sometimes the units are genuinely identical, and letting people choose only causes confusion. Our documentation describes exactly this scenario:
There are 20 identical pieces available for rent, but rather than allowing renters to select a specific one, you prefer that they book a piece at random.
Think of identical lockers, a fleet of the same rental bike, or a batch of identical projectors or tools. The customer only wants to know that a piece is available for their dates. Which one they get is your concern, not theirs.
SuperSaaS solves this with pooled resources, using a service schedule on top of your resource schedule:
- Keep your resource schedule with all the individual units, as described above. It remains your administrative overview.
- Create a new schedule of the service type and define a service on it, for example “Rent a bike”.
- On the service schedule, go to Configure > Services and connect the service to your resource schedule. Because that schedule contains multiple resources, you will see the option to connect to Any of … the resources.
- Right below it, you will find the option If multiple resources are available. Here you choose whether to let the user choose a resource, select a resource at random, or give out the first one available in the order listed on the schedule.
Customers then book on the service schedule. They see availability as a single entity: a slot is free as long as at least one of the pooled units is free. When they book, SuperSaaS picks a unit for them and blocks it on the resource schedule, where you can see exactly which piece went to whom. This setup is explained in detail in the pooled resources section of the documentation.
The choice between random and first available is mostly practical. First available fills up your list from the top, which is convenient if unit 1 is the one closest to the door. Random spreads wear and tear evenly across the fleet.
One thing to keep in mind: a service on a service schedule has a fixed duration, so you cannot let customers drag a booking to any length the way they can on a resource schedule. For rentals, the usual approach is to define a few services with different lengths, such as “half a day”, “1 day” and “2 days”, each connected to the same pool.
Example: a bicycle rental with three types of bike
To see this in action, have a look at our Bicycle rental demo. Behind it are three resource schedules, one for each type of bike: City bikes, Mountain bikes and Electric bikes. Each resource schedule lists the individual bikes of that type, which is where the rental shop keeps track of which bike is out with whom.
Customers never see those three schedules. They only see the service schedule Bicycle rental, which combines them. Its services are defined per bike type and rental length, for example “City bike ‑ half day”, “City bike ‑ 1 day” and “City bike ‑ 2 days”, and each service is connected to Any of the bikes in the matching resource schedule. When a customer picks “City bike ‑ 1 day” and a date, the calendar shows availability as long as at least one city bike is free that day, and SuperSaaS assigns a specific bike when the booking is made.
This setup gives you the best of both worlds: customers choose what matters to them, the type of bike and how long they need it, while the choice that does not matter to them, which exact bike, is made automatically.
Combine a pool with other resources
Pooled resources can be combined with other requirements for one booking. The documentation gives the example of a group booking for a tour that needs 5 bikes and one guide, where you do not care which guide, nor which specific bikes get selected from the pool. To set that up, simply add the Any of … option to the service several times, once for each bike, and add the guides as a second pool. SuperSaaS then only offers times when five bikes and a guide are all free, and assigns them when the booking is made.
Which view goes where
Since the service schedule hides the individual resources from the customer, the horizontal layout mainly matters on the resource schedule, where you and your staff look at the full overview. On a service schedule, the Vertical or Horizontal choice is only available for the month view. So a typical setup for identical rentals looks like this:
- Resource schedule, horizontal week view, used by you to see all units and their reservations, and optionally by customers who want to pick a specific unit.
- Service schedule, connected to the pool, used by customers who just want a unit for a period, like the Bicycle rental demo.
If your units are distinct and customers should always choose, you can skip the service schedule altogether and share the resource schedule directly.
Try it yourself
Open the Storage Unit Reservations demo and switch between the week view and the filter to get a feel for how a horizontal schedule with many resources behaves, and try the Bicycle rental demo to see how pooled resources look from the customer’s side. Then create a free account, add your own units, and set the layout to horizontal under Configure > Layout. The free version has no limit on the number of schedules, so you can build the complete setup before deciding whether you need a paid subscription, which starts at $9. If you get stuck, our support team is happy to help.