What is Instant Book?

Overview

Instant Book decides whether a shift someone reserves is confirmed straight away or has to be approved by an admin first.

Instant Book on: the reservation is confirmed immediately and the shift appears in their schedule.
Instant Book off: it arrives as a shift request that an admin has to approve before it counts.

It is a per opportunity setting, so you can run some opportunities open and keep others gated.

1. Who can reserve shifts in the first place?

Only people already approved or assigned to that opportunity.

Instant Book does not open your shifts to the public or to anyone who has not been through your recruitment process. It only changes what happens after that point, which is the part most often misread.

2. What happens when it is off?

Every reservation lands in your Shift requests queue for approval.

Two consequences worth knowing before you turn it off:

Nothing is confirmed until somebody actions the queue, so a shift can look unfilled while requests sit waiting.
The person may not see the shift in their own schedule right away, which generates a fair number of "did my booking work?" questions.

3. How does it interact with a registration form?

If your recruitment workflow lets people choose shifts while they register, Instant Book decides how much of that sticks:

With Instant Book: on submitting the form they are approved for the opportunity and reserved for the shifts they picked, in one step.
Without Instant Book: they are approved for the opportunity immediately, but each shift they picked is still only a request awaiting approval.

This is why Vome recommends pairing an auto-approve form action with Instant Book. Auto-approving someone into an opportunity and then making them wait on every shift is a half-open door, and it tends to surprise both sides.

4. When should I leave it off?

When who is on a given shift genuinely matters, and a wrong booking is expensive to unpick. Typical cases are shifts with a hard skill requirement, work with vulnerable clients, or a tightly capped site.

For general help, events and anything where an extra pair of hands is welcome, leaving it on saves your coordinators the queue entirely.

5. Where do I change it?

On the opportunity itself. When it is already on you will see Instant Book enabled, which you tap to disable, and Vome confirms the change.

You can change it at any time. It applies to reservations made from then on, so turning it off does not retract shifts already confirmed.

Summary

Instant Book on means reservations are confirmed immediately.
Instant Book off means every reservation becomes a shift request needing approval.
Only people approved or assigned to the opportunity can reserve its shifts either way.
Pair Instant Book with an auto-approve form action, or people are approved but still queued for shifts.
It is set per opportunity and can be changed at any time.

Instant Book on Vome, and what happens when it is off