You've completed your setup and made your first test booking. Now it's time to learn how to manage bookings and lessons in your day-to-day operations.
In this guide, we'll walk through what happens after a customer books a lesson and how your team uses Viking to organize the day.
1. Understand bookings and scheduled lessons
When a customer makes a booking, it appears under Bookings in Viking.
A booking can contain one or more lessons. Depending on your booking form settings, those lessons may already have dates and times assigned, or the customer may schedule them later.
This is an important distinction:
- Bookings: Where you can find the customer's purchase, booking price, payment status and lessons.
- Scheduled lessons: Lessons with a date and time, which appear in your planning.
- Unscheduled lessons: Lessons the customer has purchased but hasn't scheduled yet.
You can open a booking at any time to see which lessons have already been scheduled.
2. Get to know the Daily overview
Go to Planning → Daily overview.
This is where you'll manage most of your daily operations.
Select a date to see the lessons scheduled for that day. Lessons are grouped by start time and product, with the participants listed underneath.
From here, you can see:
- Which customers are coming and when
- The status of their lessons
- Outstanding payments
- Waiver status
- Customer and booking notes
- Attendance and participant experience levels
You can filter by start time, location or product to focus on the lessons you need.
For a complete explanation, see Use the Daily overview.
3. Organize your instructors in the Day planner
Go to Planning → Day planner and select a date.
The Day planner shows how participants are divided between instructors.
Viking normally assigns participants to available instructors automatically. However, you can review those groups and make adjustments where needed.
For example, you might want to:
- Group students with similar experience levels.
- Move a participant to a different instructor.
- Keep a particular instructor available for private lessons.
- Move a complete group to another instructor.
You can drag participants between instructors and existing start times. Changes are reflected in the Daily overview.
Important: Moving participants in the Day planner doesn't automatically notify customers. They receive the relevant notification when you approve their lessons.
For detailed instructions, see Use the Day planner.
4. Approve lessons and keep customers informed
Once you've reviewed your planning and know which lessons can go ahead, return to Planning → Daily overview.
Viking offers several actions for managing scheduled lessons.
Approve a lesson
When a lesson is ready to go ahead:
- Select the relevant participants or groups.
- Open With selected items....
- Choose Approve.
- Adjust the details or add a message if needed.
- Click Approve courses.
The lesson receives the status Approved, and the customer receives the corresponding email.
Send a notification
If you're not ready to approve a lesson but want to update the customer, use Send notification.
Many schools use this for standby notifications while waiting for better weather conditions.
The message depends on the email template your school has configured.
Release a lesson for rescheduling
Sometimes a lesson cannot go ahead, for example because of unsuitable weather conditions.
If you want customers to choose a new date themselves:
- Select the relevant lessons or participants.
- Open With selected items....
- Choose Release courses for rescheduling.
- Add a reason and, if useful, suggest a suitable alternative.
- Confirm the action.
Viking cancels the selected lesson and sends the customer an email. The customer can then schedule the lesson again through their customer dashboard.
Move a lesson yourself
If you already know the new date and time, you don't need to ask the customer to reschedule.
Use Change courses instead to select the new planning details yourself.
For step-by-step instructions on these actions, see Use the Daily overview.
5. Keep track of unscheduled lessons
Not every customer schedules all their lessons immediately.
For example, someone may buy a package of five kitesurf lessons and schedule only the first two. The remaining lessons are still part of their booking.
You can review the open lessons in an individual booking.
To find customers who have paid but still have unscheduled lessons, you can also use the reports in Viking.
See Find paid bookings with unscheduled lessons.
6. Manage your daily administration
The Daily overview also gives you access to several everyday tasks.
You can:
- Check whether customers have outstanding payments.
- Register payments received at your school.
- Check whether required waivers have been signed.
- Record attendance.
- View important customer and booking notes.
You don't need to open every individual booking to see this information.
For more details, see Use the Daily overview and Add a payment to a booking.
Ready to start?
You now know the basic workflow:
- Customers make bookings through your booking forms.
- Their scheduled lessons appear in your planning.
- You review the groups and instructor assignments.
- You approve lessons, communicate changes or release lessons for rescheduling.
- You manage attendance, payments and other daily tasks.
Tip: Use the test booking you created during onboarding to explore the Daily overview and Day planner before working with real customers.
If you still have questions, we can go through your school's workflow together during your onboarding video call.