New to Make, have an idea, looking for advice on feasibility

Getting Started
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1

What are you trying to achieve?

I work for a charity that provides activities for people with disabilities. We currently have a booking system that doesn’t really suit our needs as we don’t allow our clients to book our activities on a first come, first served basis due to specialist staffing requirements. “First come first served”, “book online” seems to be the main premise of online booking systems, so other systems present the same, or similar, challenges. Every step of the process is manual and when we try to change something to make one step more efficient it just makes a different step more admin heavy instead. I have this, maybe crazy, idea that we could achieve something better suited to our needs using the various Google Workspace apps, automated using Make.

Something like…
Create event in Google Sheets.
Assign clients to event in Google Sheets.
Automatically create Calendar event that goes to client.
Automatically send invoice/payment request from Quickbooks to client.
Automatically update payment status back to Google Sheets.
Automatically update Google Sheets if client cancels.
Automatically notify staff member if client cancels.
Automatically send email summary of upcoming events to client on a regular basis (fortnightly or monthly).

I am very new to Make, I only have one scenario up and running so far and am working my way through the Academy.

I am looking for advice on whether this is a) possible, b) wise, c) sustainable, d) scaleable. How much maintenance does a scenario need? I am the most technical person in the organisation but only on a contract so anything I do needs to be easy/low/no maintenance in the future (when I no longer work for them). How many operations would a scenario like that need? We support 300 clients with about 250 activities each year, each activity can have between 4-15 attendees, with plans to grow our service.

I’m also thinking maybe of an AppSheet app for the staff front end but that is a whole different thing! (Again something that is very new to me)

Steps taken so far

I haven’t started any work on this yet as it is very much just an idea at this stage. I would need to know more around feasibility, potential cost, maintenance requirements etc before I pitch it to my boss.

2

Welcome to the Make community!

This sounds absolutely doable, and it sounds like you have a well thought-out business plan.

The main issue I can see is that you could already use a CRM system to handle most of your customers, booking, and scheduling, instead of using Sheets.

How much maintenance does a scenario need?

This would have to be done in more than just one scenario. You are looking at about 10-20 hours of development work, and 2-4 hours of maintenance per month to go through the process and adjust/optimise them further.

If you would like to reach out, please use the Hire a Pro category, where you can talk about it further with automation experts via video call/screenshare/private messaging/etc. This may help you get your issue resolved faster especially if it is urgent or contain sensitive information. It is important to post your request in the Hire a Pro category, as forum members are not allowed to advertise their services in other categories like here (even if it’s free/unpaid). Once you have posted in the Hire a Pro category, that will allow other members to reach out and assist you over other forms of communication like Zoom/Teams/Meet.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.

— @samliew

P.S.: Investing some effort into the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make.