Skedda launches Booking Approvals. Introducing Booking Approvals. Some shared spaces shouldn't be first-come, first-served. Maybe it's your executive boardroom. Maybe it's a high-capacity event space. Maybe it's the one very expensive piece of lab equipment that mysteriously "breaks" whenever an inexperienced person uses it. Until now, teams handled these situations with awkward workarounds: locking down access so tightly that no one can self-serve, or letting bookings happen and then scrambling to edit or cancel them after the fact. Booking Approvals changes that. Now you can let people request certain spaces, while keeping full control over what actually gets confirmed. Admins get the oversight they need for sensitive, high-value spaces, without losing self-service for lower-stakes bookings across the organization. Let's take a closer look at how booking approval rules improve your space management: Approval rules let you add selective oversight for spaces that need a little more human judgment. These are usually the spaces that are high-demand, high-impact, or high-stakes: limited availability, sensitive access, heavier setup, or more consequences when plans change. In those cases, first-come, first-served simply doesn't cut it. In Skedda, you can choose which spaces require approval, and any attempt to book them is automatically routed through a request-first workflow. You can also fine-tune approval rules using user tags. Apply approvals only to certain groups, or exempt trusted teams so they can book normally while everyone else submits a request. Admin choice for fairer outcomes. Booking approvals work best when they aren't just a formality. Admins need to make a deliberate call based on context, policy, and priority. That's why booking requests in Skedda are non-blocking. Submitting a request doesn't put the space "on hold" for the requester. Multiple people can request the same space and time, and nothing is confirmed until an admin approves one. Once a request is approved, it becomes an official booking and the space is marked as unavailable. This matters because it prevents people from "reserving" availability with tentative requests just to grab a slot. Your most important spaces should go to the best-fit booking, not whoever clicked first. Admins can compare conflicting requests and approve the one that makes the most sense for the day. Clear workflows with fewer follow-ups. Running approvals outside a dedicated booking system gets messy fast. When decisions live across email threads, spreadsheets, and Slack messages, it's easy to lose context, miss updates, and create avoidable conflicts. With Skedda's Booking Request Dashboard, approvals are managed in one place. From the dashboard, admins can: * Review incoming requests with full details * Approve or reject requests in a click * Track request history, including approved and declined outcomes After a decision is made, Skedda automatically notifies the requester of their updated status. Users can also check their requests at any time to see whether they're pending, approved, or declined. Setting up Booking Approvals. Getting started is straightforward for Skedda Premier users: * Go to Settings | Rules | Booking Requests * Click Add a rule * Select the spaces the rule applies to * Choose whether approval is required for all users or only for users with specific tags * Start receiving requests and approving or declining them as needed Once set up, spaces that require approval are marked with a stamp icon across booking views. When users try to book those spaces, they'll be prompted to submit a request instead. They can track progress anytime in the Booking Requests dashboard in the left-hand navigation. What's next. Booking Approvals is a foundational workflow, and we're planning a few improvements next: * Support for spaces two-way synced with your internal calendar * More notification options for admins * Admin notes on approval or decline Try Booking Approvals. See Booking Approvals in action. Schedule a demo to learn how request-first workflows can bring control to high-demand spaces.

Skedda introduces Custom Admin Roles. Introducing Custom Admin Roles. Permissions in Skedda are now even more granular than ever before, completely customizable to your organization's administrative structure and booking needs. Booking management can quickly turn into a choke point, especially in organizations with multiple locations and siloed departments. If everything funnels through a single System or Booking Admin, suddenly basic operational needs turn into a support ticket queue. Skedda's new Custom Admin Roles fix that. They let you create a new role (like "Marketing Manager" or "Clinic Room Coordinator"), scope the role to specific spaces and/or space tags, and assign the role to any user. Custom Admin Roles hand over full booking admin control for only the spaces someone owns, so the people closest to your spaces can manage bookings day to day, without accidentally managing everything else in your venue. Booking Admin power, limited to the spaces you choose. Custom Admins can create, edit, and cancel bookings on behalf of others, but only in the spaces they are selected to manage. Outside of that scope, they behave like regular users. Think of them as deputized booking admins - they handle the day-to-day booking management duties for a defined sector of spaces at their workplace. It's especially helpful for organizations with multiple locations, or with rooms, desks, and resources owned by different departments. Standard System and Booking Admins remain fully in control. Here's the difference: * System Admin: Configure spaces, rules, integrations, and run booking operations. * Booking Admin: Creates, edits, and cancels bookings for all users across your venue but can't change venue settings, manage admins, or edit spaces. * Custom Admin: Creates, edits, and cancels bookings for users only within a defined set of spaces Booking management, made more efficient. Custom Admin Roles add a new layer of granularity to Skedda's permissions, making it easier to decentralize booking management without losing control. Here's how this update improves admin ownership and day-to-day operations: Delegate with ease. Stop routing every "can you move this booking?" request through a central admin. Deputize team leads, department owners, and space managers to run their own zones. They know how these spaces work best: they know the reservation schedules, the attendance patterns, the maintenance issues, the availability trends, and of course, the social dynamics between teammates. Having the people closest to your spaces manage those spaces is especially useful when: * Desks are owned by departments * Rooms have single, isolated use cases * Teams operate across multiple neighborhoods/locations * You have semi-independent groups (tenants, practitioners, studios, clinics) * Touchy resources/tools have a single owner responsible for use and maintenance Control with confidence. Custom Admin Roles are designed to avoid the classic permissions trap: either you give someone too much access, or you give them none and keep the bottleneck. With scoped roles, you can give targeted booking admin rights without exposing the entire venue to surprise booking edits across teams and locations. Scale efficiently. Decentralized operations means fewer bottlenecks, faster resolution, and less reliance on a single "hero admin" holding everything together. By empowering individual space managers to handle day-to-day booking tasks, you can start to add more desks, rooms, and resources and roll out more nuanced policies without turning operations into complete chaos. Setting up Custom Admin Roles. Getting started is refreshingly straightforward. Get started by visiting its new Admin Roles & Permissions settings page: * Go to Settings | Admin roles & permissions. * Click Add custom role and name it (role names must be unique). * Define the role scope by selecting spaces and/or space tags. * Assign the role to users (via the Users list | Edit user). Once assigned, Custom Admins will see a | key icon next to the spaces they manage across scheduler views. The same key icon will also appear next to space names in drop down menus while creating or editing bookings. Try Custom Admin Roles today. If you're managing bookings across teams, departments, or semi-autonomous groups, Custom Admin Roles are the clean way to scale delegation without creating a permissions mess.