Spotlight: Automating Availability with Limit Dates

All jobs have a tinge of busywork—those tasks that you just need to press a button here or enter some information there, nothing that requires much thought. The problem? This is exactly the type of work that feels real bad when you make an accidental mistake that gets you facepalming for the rest of the evening.

Tony Schwartz, wedding MC and DJ, knows this well. He calls himself a one-man show and manages three event businesses. To top it off, he’s a new father—so you can say that he’s a “busy man who has a lot of busywork.”

Or, at least, he would have had a lot of busywork if he hadn’t invested a good amount of time creating an entire management system that does that work for him using, of course, Gravity Forms and Gravity Perks.

He gave me a full tour of his setup (stay tuned 👀), but today I want to zoom in on a few standout solutions—all using GP Limit Dates in clever ways.

Automatically update availability

The first step of managing events professionally is knowing you can only be in one place at a time. Overlapping bookings are a logistical nightmare at best, and impossible at worst.

For this reason, Tony wanted to make sure that his prospects knew from the get-go which days he is actually available for events. So, he introduced a step that automates updating his own availability based on submissions–without having to lift a finger.

This “really cool step” (his words) ties the datepickers from his intake forms to the entries from his “Add New Event” forms–aka days that are already booked–via snippet. Then, Limit Dates does the rest: if a date is present in an entry for an “Add New Event” form, it’s automatically blocked out from the intake forms’ datepickers.

When you get a lot of inquiries, it’s not helpful to get an inquiry for a day you’ve already booked, especially for a one-man show like I am.

To show it in action, I went to Tony’s wedding inquiry form in the middle of July and was able to see his availability immediately. Looks like the soonest I can get married is the end of the month!

It saves my prospects time versus having an inquiry out there waiting on a response. They can just move on and I don’t have to fill that inquiry. It was interrupting my flow to have to check if a date was available—not good for time efficiency.

Catch slipups before they catch you

The second step of managing events professionally is getting your dates straight—not only for the big day itself, but also contract and payment dates. With Tony having to go fast to keep up with all the inquiries and events he manages, having additional checkpoints in place to ensure he’s collecting and entering correct date information is like wearing a seatbelt.

For this reason, Tony uses Limit Dates’ Minimum and Maximum dates extensively. Let’s go through a few examples:

• Limiting contract dates to the current date, ensuring 100% that both him and his clients will always have the correct date when signing their contracts.
• Requiring a future date for payments, preventing clients from accidentally scheduling a past date for payments.
• Limiting how far into the future the expiration dates for his quotes and contracts can go, keeping that momentum going without the back-of-mind fear of setting a date to a future year.

I told him I found it really interesting how he uses Limit Dates to limit things for himself, and he said:

It makes sure that there’s just no mistakes whatsoever.

Mic? Drop. 🎤

Use automation in your favor

We love to see our perks used for automation and smart tools this way—saving time so that you can use your brainpower for what really needs it, and let the systems take care of the rest, sometimes better and more precisely than we, as humans, can.

Tony said it best:

I’m not an automated machine. I want automation to save time on routine tasks.

If you want to explore one of Tony’s intake forms, you can do so here. He just launched a redesign, so it looks extra sharp! 😎

What do you think of Tony’s use of Limit Dates? Let us know in the comments 👇