Help · Getting set up
Your first hour in Side Quest Booking
The order below is not arbitrary. Each step depends on the one above it, and doing them out of order mostly means redoing them.
1. Check your timezone before anything else
Everything with a date on it hangs off this. Side Quest Booking stores the wall-clock time you type — "7:30am" — and resolves it in your timezone, not the browser's. That is what stops a 7:30am Hawaii session reading as 1:30pm when somebody opens the dashboard from Florida.
Changing it later does not move your sessions. Each keeps the instant it always had, so the boat still leaves when it leaves — but every reading shifts, which looks alarming. Set it once, at the start.
2. Build one course, all the way through
Resist setting up all twelve. Take the one you run most and get it completely right — description, duration, capacity, and the customer types you actually sell to. The second course takes five minutes once the first one taught you the shape.
Customer types are prices, not people
"Student", "observer", "returning diver" — each is a separately priced way to occupy a seat. If two people pay different amounts for the same course, that is two customer types.
3. Add the dates
Courses that repeat can be generated from a rule rather than typed one at a time, and any individual date can override the standard price — high season, a holiday weekend, a private group.
4. Add gear and add-ons
Wetsuit rental, fin rental, a photo package. These attach to courses and appear at checkout. An add-on with sizes is one add-on with options, not six add-ons.
5. Decide what you need to ask, and what needs signing
Two different tools, and picking the wrong one is the commonest setup mistake here — see a waiver is not an intake form. Briefly:
- Intake form — logistics you need to know. Sizes, arrival dates, whether they are borrowing a mask.
- Waiver — a document that gets signed. Your liability release, your agency's medical statement.
Attach each to the courses that need it. A course can require several waivers — a release, a medical statement and a photo consent are three separate signatures.
6. Connect Stripe
Side Quest Booking does not hold your money. Payouts go to your own Stripe account on your own schedule; Side Quest Booking's fee comes off the top of each booking and is visible on every one.
Until Stripe is connected and enabled, your courses can be set up and previewed but nothing can be charged — including deposits.
7. Add your staff last
Once there is something for them to look at. Three roles:
- Owner — everything, including money and approving support access.
- Manager — day-to-day running, including bookings and refunds.
- Crew — the roster for the day. No money, and no medical answers: crew see whether a student is cleared to dive, never what they answered.