Ready for the summer? Four things to set up now

Tomorrow the first summer holiday week starts. For the coming weeks you'll be running at full capacity — with no time to sit behind a laptop arranging things you could just as well arrange today.

Hence this list. Four things, each a few minutes of work. Set them up once, and they run by themselves all summer.

1. Put your check-in reminders on autopilot

Why: participants who don't complete their online check-in mean work on the day itself: chasing down details, filling in forms on the spot. Sending a manual reminder every week is something you'll forget once — precisely in the busiest week.

How to set it up:

1. Go to Communication → Campaigns and create a new campaign of the type Check-in reminder.
2. Set up to three moments. What works well: one week, 2 days and 1 day before the start.
3. Select all your summer events in one go.
4. Write your own text for each moment under Content — the last one can be a bit more urgent than the first.

After that, you don't have to look at it again:

• Anyone who has already checked in doesn't get a reminder.
• Anyone who registers late automatically gets the next upcoming reminder.
• On the campaign page you can see per event what's scheduled and what's been sent.

2. Schedule your welcome email and your "that's a wrap" email

Why: the email on day one ("here's the programme, here's where to find us") and the email afterwards ("thanks, here are the photos") are the emails participants actually read. And they're exactly the emails that fall through the cracks when you're standing on the jetty yourself.

How to set it up. One rule of thumb:

• Is the email the same for every event? Create a campaign of the type Before the start of the event. You set the moment as a sentence: "Send this email on the day of the start of the event at 15:00." That also works after the fact: "2 days after the end of the event at 10:00." Buchung calculates it per event — including events you add to the campaign later.
• Is the content unique per event? Then schedule a broadcast per event for a fixed date and time. The recipient list is determined at the moment of sending, so late registrations are automatically included.

In both cases you can insert the link to the event's photo album directly as a variable in your email — more on that below.

3. Collect outstanding balances during check-in

Why: chasing invoices after the summer is the most tedious job of the year. You can now settle them on the spot, while the participant is standing in front of you — from your phone or laptop, without a card terminal.

How it works:

1. Open the registration during check-in. If there's still an amount open, you'll see it right away: Payment due with the amount. If everything is settled, it shows a green Paid.
2. Click Collect payment and create the QR code.
3. The participant (or parent) scans the code and pays on their own phone with iDEAL, through your own Mollie account.
4. Your screen updates by itself the moment the payment comes in: Payment received. No refreshing, no checking Mollie.

Someone paying from home? Send the same link via WhatsApp or email.

This also works for selling on location. An extra wetsuit, an extra lesson? Choose Add upsell and then Process and collect now — the QR appears immediately for exactly the right amount. And because it simply sits on the booking, it flows automatically into your bookkeeping, and after the summer you can see exactly what you sold on location.

More detail in the changelog article: Collect payment on the spot during check-in.

4. Share your photos through an album page, not a Drive folder

Why: everyone knows the Drive link in an email. Parents trying to open 15 MB originals on campsite Wi-Fi, "can I get access?" requests, and a browser that freezes on "download all". From now on, every event in Buchung has its own album page.

How it works:

1. Go to Updates → Albums on your event and click New album.
2. Drag your photos in — hundreds a day if you like. JPG, PNG, HEIC and video up to 1 GB per file. The upload keeps running while you carry on with other things.
3. Click Publish and share the link or QR code via Share. Or include the album link as a variable in your "that's a wrap" email (see point 2).

Why this works better than a Drive folder:

• Opens instantly on every phone. Everyone gets the size that fits their screen, not the full original.
• One button to download everything, as a single tidy zip file.
• Private without the hassle. No accounts or access requests: one long, unguessable link, which doesn't end up in Google. Location data from photos is never shown.
• You can see whether people are looking. Per album you see views and unique visitors — without cookies or banner fuss.

This is the first version, and we're building it out over the summer based on your feedback. On the list, among other things: automatically adding your logo as a watermark, cleaning up file names, and enhancing photos. If you run into something or miss something: let us know.

Bonus: record now what you'll want to know in September

In August you still know exactly which participant stood out, who went home sick, or who you never want in a mailing again. In November you don't.

That's what registration milestones are for: your own signals that you record on a registration, such as "potential staff member" or "went home due to illness". You create them under Settings → Bookings → Registration milestones, and record them per registration or in bulk from an event. After the summer you use them as an audience or an exclusion — for example, one email to everyone you flagged as a potential staff member this summer.

More detail: Record registration milestones.

Get started

All four together take less than an hour. Stuck setting something up? Just email or call us — we'll switch it on together before the first group arrives. Have a great summer!