Manage Multiple Business Locations Efficiently with Teamup

Last updated Oct 2, 2024

When your business is expanding, Teamup can expand with you. If you’re opening one new service center or adding a whole new roster of teams in different regions, you can scale the way you use Teamup to fit. Let’s take a look at the important factors to consider as you set up to manage multiple business locations. Choosing the right scheduling structure will help you manage more efficiently.

How to manage multiple locations

There are three important factors when you’re ready to scale up and use Teamup for multiple locations or teams:

1. Combined or separate management: Is it better to use one combined master calendar to manage all locations/teams, or use separate master calendars for each location/team?
2. Account-based access or link-based access: What’s the best way give people access to the calendar and what permissions should you use?
3. Subscription level: Based on your decisions for the first two factors, what’s the right subscription level for your needs?

In this article, we’ll look at the first important factor for managing multiple locations or teams with Teamup: Whether to use combined or separate management. No matter which structure is best for you, with Teamup you can still get a combined overview of all business locations.

Combined or separate management

When you create a Teamup Calendar, what you create is a master calendar. 

In a master calendar, you can:

• Add many sub-calendars.
• Organize them in folder hierarchies.
• Use color-coding, custom event fields, and other features to customize your calendar.
• Set up customized access so each person sees only the sub-calendars relevant to their role.

So when you add a new location or team, you have a choice: manage multiple locations on one calendar, or set up separate calendars for each location.

Let’s walk through a couple of scenarios to demonstrate.

Using a combined master calendar

Jamal owns a service center. He manages the scheduling with Teamup:

Jamal just opened a second location on the other side of town. To manage scheduling the jobs and techs for this new location, he adds sub-calendars and organizes everything in folders. So now his master calendar looks like this:

For his location managers, he sets up calendar access so they only see their respective location’s sub-calendars. Here’s what calendar access looks like for the West Location manager:

Each staff member gets customized access for their role. Office staff who help with scheduling jobs can be given access to all their location’s calendars. The techs can view the office hours for their location and their own schedule, only:

This setup means that Jamal, as the business owner, gets a single overview of all scheduling for both locations. He can keep an eye on productivity, jobs, and tech availability for both locations from one calendar. He can compare what’s happening at the different locations. And he can easily allocate resources or schedule people across locations, as needed. For example, if things are particularly busy at Location A, he can see which techs at Location B have a lighter workload and can be sent over to help.

Delivery drivers can use the Teamup app to view their schedule and open a mapped location to the next delivery address:

This setup also means that both locations have the same calendar defaults and custom fields, even though they see different sub-calendars.

Here’s why using a combined master calendar works well for Jamal:

• He can oversee scheduling for both locations in one place.
• Both locations have a similar workflow. So they can both use the same custom fields and calendar defaults.
• He can allow his managers to do their own scheduling, for their own locations.
• He can easily compare and view availability for both locations when needed.

So in this scenario, a combined master calendar is a great way to go for multiple locations. Now let’s take a look at a difference scenario.

Using separate master calendars

Dyani owns a marketing company. Everyone works remotely and they use Teamup:

She’s just expanded her company by purchasing a small PR firm. The PR firm maintains an office in the business district, and the staff members work from home or in the office as needed.

Dyani’s marketing company already has name and brand recognition. The PR firm will come under that brand umbrella, but will maintain its own distinct identity. The marketing company has a well-defined, specific workflow; and so does the PR firm, which handles different clients and projects.

In this case, it makes more sense to manage each location separately, with its own master calendar. So the parent marketing company will maintain its current calendar. And Dyani will set up a new Teamup calendar for the PR firm, with its own branding and title. She can create custom fields that are specific to their workflow and include a sub-calendar for assigning in-office hours to staff members.

Dyani can easily switch between the two calendars from her dashboard. But she’d also like to have one overview of the clients and projects happening in both the marketing and PR sides. So she creates an overview using iCalendar feeds from each separate master calendar. She can set up one combined feed from the marketing calendar and the PR calendar, or she can create individual feeds for each sub-calendar to keep things more organized.

Here’s a view of an overview calendar with combined feeds:

For Dyani, separate master calendars make sense:

• The two teams have distinct identities and branding. Each master calendar can be customized for its team/location.
• The teams handle different projects and different types of work. So they need their own custom fields and calendar configuration, specific to their workflow.
• Dyani wants a combined overview, but the teams are managed separately and don’t need to share availability or info across locations.

What’s next as you scale with Teamup?

To manage multiple business locations, it’s important to think about what we’ve discussed here: Whether you’ll stick with a combined master calendar, or set up separate master calendars for each location. Once you know which approach works best for your needs, you’re ready to think about the next two factors: access and subscription.

In the meantime, try a live demo to explore different options or go ahead and get started quickly with our template: