Can Make automate my event management workflow after a booking is confirmed?

Beginner Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’m a small business owner and I run a party rental and event planning business "Hafla Rental".

We don’t offer instant online booking. Customers first submit an inquiry, and once we confirm the booking with them, that’s when our team starts managing everything manually.

I’m wondering if Make can automate the workflow after a booking has been confirmed.

Ideally, I’d like it to:

  • Create the event in Google Calendar.
  • Assign tasks to the delivery and event management teams for the event date.
  • Send a confirmation email to the customer.
  • Notify the relevant team members with the booking details.

Is this something Make is well suited for, and how would you approach a workflow like this?

I’d really appreciate any guidance, as I’m completely new to Make.

3

Hey there,

this is something Make was created for. All of the things you listed are possible. But what is your current stack? Are you already using some platforms where you are keeping the records in? At least a google sheet, if not Airtable, Monday or ClickUp or something similar?

4

Make is a great fit for your use case – but it’s still just a tool.

Before touching any module, map your process first. No fancy notation or tool required – a blank sheet of paper works fine.
Sketch what triggers the process, what conditions need to be met at each step, which documents get created along the way, and what the end result looks like, for example:

  • Event in Google Calendar → [email protected]
    • Event tittle: Rental {{city}} x {{customerName}}
    • Event desciription: {{list of rented items}} + {customerContactDetails}
    • Event notification: 3 days before

Then think about the less glamorous stuff: deduplication and customer data compliance.

The biggest gap I’d flag – and this is just an assumption based on your post– is submission tracking.
Do you have any tool or sheet to track which form submissions are confirmed, which are being processed, and which are still in the queue?
Stoyan already asked this, and it’s the right question. If the answer is no, Make can handle that too – even a simple Google Sheet or an Airtable base should fit your case. And that’s the most important part of your workflow. And strategic decision for your company as many further automations probably will be created and connected :slight_smile:

You could also look at dedicated rental tools like Odoo and use Make to add on whatever’s missing like creating gCalendar Event and create tasks in your project management tool (which can be also Odoo or any of other tools like Asana, Trello or even custom built in Airtable).

There’s no single right answer here.

Make is excellent at building workflows like yours and extending the tools you’re already using.

Have a nice day,
Michal

5

Yes. I would use the change to Confirmed as the trigger, not the original inquiry.

Keep one booking record as the source of truth with a unique booking ID, status, event date and time, venue, customer email, delivery window, and assigned team. When that record changes to Confirmed, Make can create or update the Google Calendar event, create the delivery and event tasks, send the approved customer email, notify the team, and write every created record ID back to the booking.

Use the booking ID as the idempotency key so a rerun updates the same event and tasks instead of duplicating them. Failed steps should go to an exception queue for review rather than sending a second customer email.

The key question is where your team currently marks a booking as confirmed: a spreadsheet, CRM, rental system, or email? If you share the current tool and one redacted booking example, I can outline the exact trigger and field map here; no credentials are needed.

6

Thanks! That’s really reassuring to hear. At the moment, everything is quite simple. We’re using a website for inquiries, Google Workspace (Calendar, Gmail, Sheets), and WhatsApp for communication. We don’t currently use Airtable, Monday, or ClickUp, but I’m open to adopting one if it makes the workflow easier. Do you think Google Sheets is a good starting point, or would you recommend using a dedicated project management tool from the beginning?

7

Thanks for taking the time to explain everything, Michal.

Right now, we only use Google Sheets and Google Calendar, but honestly we’re not using them in a structured way. A lot of the work is still manual, so I can understand why you suggested mapping the whole process first before trying to automate it.

I also appreciate your suggestion about mapping the whole process first. I think that will help me understand what actually needs to be automated before I start building anything in Make.

I hadn’t looked into Odoo before, so I’ll definitely take a look and see whether it fits our business. And it’s good to know there are dedicated rental platforms available.

Thanks again!

8

@haflaRental avoiding duplicate triggers on post-booking flows usually comes down to setting up idempotency.

basically, store the booking ID in your main DB/sheets before running any notifications. then in make, add a lookup step right after the trigger to check if that booking ID was already processed. if it exists, router stops the run so clients never get double emails or duplicate calendar events.

if you need help mapping out the error handling or router logic for your booking setup, shoot me a DM.