The first stage of creating your automated booking system is to sign up to a project management system that integrates with Zapier. In this example, we use Asana, which works perfectly for this process.

If you are not familiar with Asana, it is an extremely useful (and free!) project management software. You can create a project and invite colleagues to your team to give them access to view and manage individual tasks. Asana is available as an App on Zapier, which will help us through many stages of the process.

Once you have signed up to Asana, you can edit the format of the board to fit your process. We recommend creating the following columns To Do, Editing and Complete, so all team members can view how each order is being processed.

When setting up your columns, you need to make sure there is a general ‘To Do’ column which is where all orders will be sent to. Team members can then drop each task into the correct column when relevant.

Once complete, the next stage depends on how your property marketing pack orders are taken. If the vendor purchases this online, such as through Shopify, a zap can be created to integrate all orders and data collected from the transaction into Asana. If you do not currently take orders this way, it might be a good idea to look into it, as it will save your finance department lots of time.

To set this up, select Shopify in Zapier, and select New Order as the trigger event.

In the action section, select the Asana app, and select Create Task at the action event. Once this is correctly set up, any new orders in Shopify will appear in your Asana To Do list for all team members to see.

If you take the payments any other way, or do not take payments at all, you can enter the job into Asana manually. You just need to ensure that each task if formatted the same way, with the email address located in the same field.

The next stage of the process relies on tags being added to a task. Tags need to be created for each photographer, then when an order comes through as a task in the ‘to do’ column, the correct photographer for the job needs to tag their name. This is extremely important for the next stage of the process.